The Children of Hamelin (8 page)

Acid was as heavy a trip as smack—heavier.

But I knew for dead-certain that I could never get really hooked on
this
.

In the hall on the tenth floor outside the agency, Dickie Lee said: “And what kind of weekend did
you
have, Tom old man?” And smiled that thick-lipped pleasantly shit-eating smile of his, raised his bushy black brows, rolled what he referred to as “my sensual brown eyes,” did everything but drool. Good old Dickie.

“Kinda dull, Dickie,” I told him. “Went to a party in a loony-bin, met the Devil, didn’t like him, got picked up by a naked chick in a peacoat, balled her, she dropped LSD in my breakfast coffee, took me on a magic carpet ride, and I spent Sunday recuperating with the funnies. An off-week.”

Dickie tsk-tsked. “I feel for you, m’boy,” he said. “You lead such a mundane existence.”

Dickie and I had a strange thing going: we pretended to believe each other’s most outrageous bullshit while really not taking seriously a word the other said. Thus, I could tell Dickie the absolute truth about my lost weekend secure in the knowledge that he would accept it without blinking an eye as the usual Monday morning cock-and-bull story in our endless game of rank-counter-rank.

“I, on the other hand,” Dickie said, opening the walnut-veneered door with
Dirk Robinson Literary Agency, Inc.
lettered in fading gilt on the upper toilet-door glass panel, “met an exiled Yugoslavian countess unfortunately afflicted with nymphomania and spent two solid days polluting my vital bodily fluids in a Park Avenue penthouse. I’ve got a charleyhorse in my dick.”

Into the entrance foyer, paneled in walnut plywood, carpeted in black synthetic, lit by an atrocious monster of a chandelier, the walls festooned with a display of books the agency had had a hand (or even a pinky) in, and barricaded at the far end by an enormous desk behind which Maxine the receptionist-telephone-answerer-fee-writer-intimidator with the enormous tits should’ve been sitting in the usual tight blouse if she hadn’t, as usual, been late.

“La vida es suena,”
I commiserated with Dickie as he outflanked the desk and opened the door to the office itself by yanking on the giant brass doorknob.

“Verdad,”
he said, as I followed him into the boiler room. The boiler room was another of Dirk Robinson’s exercises in cut-rate image-mongering. From the entrance, you did not really notice that the room was painted a high-school-corridor gray and floored with the cheapest of beige plastic tiles because your vision was immediately channeled along the black strip of carpeting that ran from the door between two pairs of walnut desks that faced each other across it like an honor-guard before the big door in the walnut-paneled rear wall that bore a heavy bronze plaque proclaiming
Dirk Robinson, President.
The entrance foyer had been built along the right wall of the boiler room and if you looked to the left, you saw a smaller door in the rear wall that had
Richard Lee, Vice President
lettered directly on the wood in gold paint and backing the left-hand pair of pro desks, a businesslike line of filing cabinets covering the entire left-hand wall. This was what the rare fee-writer who managed to penetrate the outer defenses saw.

But as Dickie trotted past the pro desks, where Phil and Bob, two of the three guys who handled the bona fide professional writers, had already arrived, I made a hard left turn, opened the gate in the waist-high railing and was in the sweat-shop area, hidden from the glance of the casual visitor by the inner wall of the entrance foyer partition: two parallel ranks of three-desk gray metal consoles facing the railing out of light-of-sight of the entrance. And don’t think Dirk Robinson didn’t plan it that way.

The front rank of desks belonged to Arlene, the bookkeeper and general top-level flunky who was already busy on her phone; Nancy, the bouncy little filing clerk who was busily sorting the Monday morning overload of manuscripts; and the probationary fee-reader of the moment, a nameless pimply youth who wasn’t there and odds-on had been fired by Dickie on orders from Dirk last Friday.

I sat behind the middle desk in the back row, flanked on my left by Mannie Berkowitz, an aging, balding, promising young writer who was already moaning softly over a manuscript, and on my right by Bruce Day, a crypto-hippy in perfunctory Madison Avenue disguise (whom I copped some grass from now and then), and who was just sitting down as I planted my ass behind the old Royal electric typewriter.

“Another day, another ten points, another twenty dollars,” Bruce said, putting on his steel-rimmed glasses. (A subtle note of defiance he had adopted when the Man, through Dickie, had decreed that his beard had to go.) What Bruce was referring to was the Dirk Robinson fee-reader point-count system, otherwise referred to as the Track Record. Each incoming manuscript was assigned a point-value by Nancy according to its length: one point for short story, five points for the average novel, eight points for a long novel, ten points for some cretin’s million-word life-work, and various intermediary point-counts for odd lengths. Each fee-reader had a weekly quota of fifty points and a base pay of $100. Therefore, each point was worth $2 to us. A real Stakhanovite could tear off as many as a hundred points in a week, especially if he had plenty of novels, and when one of us was hard up for bread, the general agreement was that he would get the bulk of that week’s juicy five-and-eight pointers. What, one might ask, was each point worth to Dirk Robinson, Inc.? Well, the agency charged $10 for a one-pointer, $35 for a five-pointer, $55 for an eight-pointer and like that, so we figured (figuring in Nancy’s salary, postage, stationery and etc.) that the Man made about $400 off an average week’s mixed bag that netted one of us peons $100. Or something like $1,200 a week total, $5,000 a month, maybe $60,000 a year. Not bad at all.

Berkowitz moaned again, and dropped the manuscript he had been reading back on the untidy pile next to his typewriter. He fitted a letter-head sheet, a carbon, and an onion-skin second sheet (the Man did not miss a chance at saving a penny on the cheapest possible second sheets) into his typewriter and said: “The Mad Dentist promises us a novel by next week. I can’t take him anymore. A nice easy five points, maybe eight. Do I have a taker?”

Berkowitz must be cracking up, I thought. The Mad Dentist was a long-time fee-writer whose thesis was that fluoridated drinking water was a Communist plot to destroy the American economy by ruining the dental industry. He had exposed this hideous plot in about a dozen articles, half a dozen short stories, a nonfiction book and a science fiction novel. All of which we had of course rejected as “showing considerable talent but not quite meeting the current demands of the marketplace.” I could tell what the new Dr. Owen F. Mannigan opus would be like without reading it; therefore it was an easy five-pointer; therefore Berkowitz had to be crazy for opting out.

“I volunteer,” I therefore said.

“Sold to Thomas Hollander and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul!” Berkowitz said with a sigh of ill-concealed relief that I did not like one little bit.

“All right, Mannie,” I said, “what’s the kicker?”

Berkowitz’s dark, perpetually-sour face lit up with a sadistic grin. “I quote from the latest letter from our beloved Mad Dentist,” he said. He took a yellow sheet of legal stationery from his “In” and began reading:

... since apparently the Bolshevik conspiracy to bankrupt the American dental industry has subverted the publishing industry as well, I have stolen a tactic from the handbook of the Communist Fluoridators and have cleverly disguised my latest expose of the Marxist-Leninist plot, titled,
SUCK IT TO ‘EM!,
as what I believe is referred to in the publishing trade as a novel of sexual passion—

“Stop! Stop!” I screamed.

“Jesus Christ,” Bruce said, “a sex novel!”

Shit! That bastard Berkowitz!

“Berkowitz,” I said, “this is an atrocity. You have violated the Geneva Convention. I shall complain to the Red Cross.”

But before I could get any further in what I knew was a lost cause, Nancy dropped the doubled-sized Monday load of muck on our collective desk and we fell to squabbling over the spoils.

Dear Mrs. Clinestadt:

Thank you very much for your most interesting short story,
A Mother’s Love.
It is always a pleasure to encounter for the first time the work of a new writer with as much obvious talent as this piece clearly shows...

Ah yes, you old douche-bag, you clearly have an obvious talent for writing $10 checks. Stick with Dirk Robinson, baby, and we’ll have you turning out five-pointers in no time.

... and I especially admired your prose-style, which combines a sure sense of sentence structure with a wholly feminine ambience entirely appropriate to this touching tale of a mother’s unsuccessful efforts to save her son from the wiles of a wicked woman...

The technique of writing a Dirk Robinson fee letter is such a simple exercise in abnormal psychology that I just don’t understand why so many fee readers bomb out after a few days. I suppose they just can’t type fast enough or maybe they’re stupid enough to read everything in the old compost-heap word for word.

... however I’m afraid that you, like so many other Dirk Robinson clients who later have gone on to fame and fortune in the literary arena, are not yet familiar with the elements that make a story salable on today’s highly-competitive market...

Just follow the rules. Rule one: each short story gets a two-page (single-spaced) letter of criticism, four pages for a five-pointer, six for an eight-pointer, eight for a ten-pointer. (Which is why the five, eight, and ten pointers are valuable—less paper to cover with babble per point.) Therefore, write as inflated a prose as you can and use short paragraphs. (The double-space between paragraphs equals about fifteen words of letter.) Rule two: every writer is “talented”; bums we don’t get at Dirk Robinson, Inc.
Never
criticize prose-style, that’s sure to hurt the blown-up egos of the fee creeps, and a deflated ego means no more submissions and that makes the Man unhappy.

... therefore, I’m afraid that I’m going to have to return this story to you as unsuitable for the current literary marketplace. However, I feel certain that your undeniable talent, combined with diligence and regular production will soon place you within the ranks of our selling authors...

Rule three: hit them with the rejection quickly, cleanly, and before the end of page one and follow it
immediately
with praise for the old talent. Never tell them the story is a dog (remember, they’re Great Writers); tell them it just happens to be unmarketable. And follow that with a sales pitch for more submissions.

... this is not to say that a salable story of this nature cannot be written, but due to the current state of the market, only a most unusually strong piece in this vein has a fighting chance...

Rule four: don’t discourage nobody from writing nothing. Get those new submissions! Maybe this old bat can write only sniveling motherhood stories, the way the Mad Dentist can only write about the Communist Fluoridation Plot or Martin K. Beale about Aaron Burr. Let the creeps do their thing. Rule five: don’t actually lie about the story. Tell them how great they are, then chop the story to pieces fast, and get out neat:

... I’m sorry that
A Mother’s Love
could not be the story that breaks you into the ranks of our many selling authors, Mrs. Clinestadt, for your own sake as well as mine, since our modest reading fees merely cover our editorial costs in considering the work of new writers for the market. However, I feel confident that your next submission will be a giant step forward in your literary career. I’ll be looking forward to seeing more of your work soon.

Sincerely,

DIRK ROBINSON

That’s all there really is to it. Attach the letter to the manuscript and off it goes to the mailing room. And return bitches are the worry of Jack Miller, the fee-correspondence specialist. Dirk has it down to a science.

Even the moral angle, as the man would put it. Dirk unburdens his soul to Dickie (though it may be a plot) and Dickie tells Dirk Robinson stories to the rest of us, either out of genuine admiration or under orders, and probably both. But whether by accident or chance (fat chance!) we fee readers have been provided with an excellent moral rationalization (the only fringe benefit of the job) which I have no doubt Dirk thoroughly believes and which I may even believe too. The Gospel according to St. Robinson:

We are a legitimate literary agency with many successful authors in our stable. Therefore, when we tell the fee writers that we will evaluate their manuscripts for the market and sell them if possible, we are telling the truth. We are under no moral obligation, however, to inform them that we accept for marketing approximately one fee manuscript out of two hundred. We do not lie to them; they lie to themselves by assuming that their manuscript is worth the powder to blow it to hell. We are selling a service and a few professional writers have actually emerged from the depths of feedom. Therefore, we do good. Also, the fee operation pays for the entire overhead of the professional operation so that all commissions on sales are profits. Who can deny that
this
is a Good Thing?

Thus spake Dirk Robinson. I’ve even heard it from the man himself on occasion. It’s true as far as it goes.

Of course, only a junkie, ex or otherwise, would pick up on the significance of the fact that Dirk is sometimes referred to in the boiler room as the Man.

Personally, I carry the justification a bit further:

Fee writers are shits. They are shits because, as Berkowitz, our resident Struggling Young Writer continually moans, they firmly believe that any prick with access to a typewriter is a Writer. Actually, fee creeps want to be Authors, not Writers. People who answer Dirk Robinson ads are the same people that answer Rosicrucian ads. They assume that they have Talent up front. They swallow the bullshit we dish out because we tell them what they want to hear. They are ego-junkies. They are shits. They are asking for it, and we give it to them, is all. We fill a need, just like dealers in more concrete commodities like smack.