You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About (14 page)

Our final activity for the day is rafting on the Jordan River. This is another one of those activities that in the United States would be preceded by form signing and a safety lecture, and would probably involve a guide. Here, we basically pile into rubber rafts and shove off, on our own. The river is crowded. It’s rush hour for rafts on the Jordan Expressway. Some are Jewish rafts and some are Arab rafts, but everybody’s in a good mood. We’re all using our paddles to splash one another—Jews splashing Jews, Arabs splashing Arabs, Jews splashing Arabs, Arabs splashing Jews. Along the riverbanks, people are hanging out, barbecuing and smoking hookahs. It’s a totally mellow scene.

It occurs to me, as we drift along, that maybe the way to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East is to take the leaders of the various hostile nations and put them together in a raft out here on the Jordan River. Call me a dreamer, but I bet that after an hour or so of drifting amid that happy throng of rafters—seeing all these ordinary people of different religions and ethnic backgrounds getting along, having fun together, without animosity or hatred—these leaders would find a way, somehow, to kill one another with their paddles.

So never mind.

DAY TEN

This day begins with one of the most dramatic events in the history of Israel, if not the entire world.

Michelle, who has been following the developments on her phone, wakes me up at 6 a.m. with the shocking news: The Miami Heat, trailing three games to two in the NBA finals, are in danger of losing Game 6, and the championship, to the San Antonio Spurs.

I am not the kind of man to panic in an emergency. Calmly, I leap out of bed, turn on the TV, find the game—which is being broadcast in Hebrew—and begin shouting at the screen. Despite my efforts, the game does not go well. With less than thirty seconds to play, the Heat are five points down. The situation seems hopeless; it appears that the championship is lost. In Miami, hundreds of spectators are streaming out of the arena.

That’s how some so-called fans handle adversity: When things look bad for their team, they give up hope. They despair. They throw in the towel. And that— k. Acalled to put it bluntly—is just wrong. Because now—when the going gets tough—is no time to surrender to negativity and doubt. It is precisely at this time, at the darkest hour, when you need to reach deep down inside and—somehow, some way—find your inner strength. This is the time to
believe
.

This, in short, is a time for faith.

And at that moment, there in Israel, birthplace of religions, heartland of spirituality, I can
feel
something. That’s right: Me, the nonbeliever, Mr. Cynical. I can
feel
it and I know it’s real. I turn to Michelle and I tell her what I am feeling in my heart, my very
soul.

“They’re going to lose,” I say.

But somehow, impossibly, they battle back. The arena is going insane. The Hebrew announcers are drenching their microphones in saliva. I am stalking around the room, shouting helpful advice to the Heat players. With five seconds left and the Heat trailing by three, Ray Allen, following my explicit instructions (“Make It! Make it! MAKEITMAKEITMAKEIT!”), hits a three-point shot that historians will someday rank, in terms of historical significance, alongside, if not just ahead of, the Louisiana Purchase. The Heat win in overtime, and cries of joy echo up and down the halls of the Kfar Blum Kibbutz Hotel.

So it’s a pretty good morning.

After breakfast we board our bus and set out to see some more important ancient things that, to be brutally honest, we are not that excited about. If you’ve ever been on a longish bus tour, you know that at some point you just run out of gas. You cannot absorb another fascinating fact. But Doron still has plenty of pent-up information to impart to us and we don’t want to let him down, so we file off the bus and trudge around, dutifully looking at and taking pictures of a series of mosaics, columns, random piles of stones, etc., left by the Greeks and Romans. At this point, we’re wishing, as a tour group, that the Greeks and Romans had just stayed the hell back in Greece and Rome instead of coming here and littering the landscape with all these freaking
ruins
.

The low point comes when our tour takes us through yet
another
ancient water tunnel. Our feeling, as a tour group, is that if you have sloshed through one dark cramped clammy tunnel full of ancient water that you do not really know the source of, you have sloshed through them all. Nobody wants to do this one. But we do it. Because, dammit, we’re
tourists
.

From the tunnel we proceed to Caesarea, an ancient Mediterranean port city, where we view, among other things, the ruins of a Roman latrine. Caesarea also has wifi, but that was installed after the Romans.

We end the day back where we started our Israel trip, in Tel Aviv. We have dinner at a dockside restaurant with Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. (Not in the sense of eating at the same table with him, but in the sense of seeing him walk past the restaurant while we’re eating.) (At least we think it’s him.)

Our time in Israel is almost done, and together our group has experienced many interesting, even amazing, things. Along the way we’ve been transformed from a semi-random collection of people who happened to be on a tour bus together into genuine friends. So it’s not surprising that much of the conversation at dinner concerns Ray Allen.

DAY ELEVEN

We leave Israel today, so much of the day is spent preparing for the trip home, by which I of course mean: shopping. We also pack. I decide to throw out my defective forty-shekels-apiece sandals, which are pretty funky from sloshing through ancient historic underground water. My hope, as I put them into the hotel-room wastebasket, is that they will wind up in the hands of some less fortunate person, who will burn them.

We have our final group dinner, drinking toasts to Rabbi Eddie and Doron. Then it’s back on the bus one last time for the trip to the airport and a bunch of good-bye hugs. Then we’re on the overnight El Al flight back to the States. We land early in the morning; when we turn on our phones, we learn that the Miami Heat have won Game 7 and the NBA championship. I’m beginning to believe that there might be a Higher Power after all. Here I am referring to LeBron James.

So our Israel adventure ends on a happy note. Which is fitting because it was a great trip. Israel is a fascinating, beautiful place, and surprisingly welcoming. We’d been told
that Israelis can be brusque, but almost everyone we encountered was helpful and friendly. The wifi is abundant and the food is excellent; the falafel should win some kind of Nobel Prize. We never felt unsafe, except the times when we were walking backward off the cliff and riding Thunderbolt the Racing Camel, both of which were our own fault.

Would we go back to Israel? We would in a heartbeat. In fact,
we’ve already decided that we will and the reason is simple: Apparently we need more menorahs.

B
eing a professional author is a great job. You get to work at home, be your own boss and wear whatever you want.

FACT:
Ernest Hemingway wrote
The Sun Also Rises
wearing a penguin costume.
*

Another benefit of being a professional author is you also have complete freedom to snack. I eat as many as forty-five distinct snacks per day. My typical schedule is, I spend several minutes working on writing something (this sentence, for example) and then I’ll think to myself, quote,
“Snack time!”
Then I’ll head to the kitchen to see what’s available. There is basically nothing in my kitchen that I have not, at one time or another, as a professional author, smeared peanut butter on. I include pot holders in that statement.

And then there is the pay. It is excellent. I’m not saying that you will, right off the bat, with no author experience, make the kind of money Stephen King makes. Achieving that level of success can take, literally, months. But the potential is there, especially if you are a fast typist, because the standard practice in the writing industry is to pay authors by the word. Let me repeat that statement for emphasis: The standard practice in the industry is to pay authors
by the word
. At this point, you are thinking to yourself in your mind:
Wait a minute, is he saying that
the standard practice in the industry is to pay authors by the word?
Yes! That is what I am saying! (Specifically, I am saying that the standard practice in the industry is to pay authors by the word.)

Another thought you may have is:
Do I have what it takes to make the grade as a professional
writer?
I will answer that question with brutal and unflinching honesty: Yes. Don’t be discouraged if you have no formal training in the field of writing. Writing is not one of those activities that require a specific skill, such as golf, opera or radiator repair. You
can
be a writer.
Anyone
can be a writer.

FACT:
William Shakespeare, who is responsible for some of the greatest works of Western literature including the original version of
West Side Story
, was raised in a rural village without any formal education and could neither read nor write nor speak English. Many historians now believe he may actually have been a horse.

FACT:
When J. K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book, she was a single mother on welfare who was nrn shiterallyboth blind and deaf and had been chained to a dungeon wall for eleven years
upside down
.

FACT:
John Grisham is from Mississippi.

If these individuals were able to overcome such hardships and become successful authors, there is no reason why you can’t. So let’s get started!

The first step is to have a snack.

(
Thirty-minute break.
)

OK, time to get started!

HOW TO BREAK INTO THE WRITING FIELD

Let’s get one thing straight: There are no shortcuts to becoming a successful published author. It takes determination and a lot of plain old hard work. You cannot just sit around and wait for literary success to be dropped on you out of the sky by some magical success-pooping seagull. No, you must roll up your sleeves, plant yourself in front of your computer and perform the difficult—and lonely—task of writing a letter to a successful author asking for free advice. This is the only known way to succeed as a writer. We published authors receive such letters all the time. Mine generally sound like this:

Dear Mr. Berry,

I am a recent college graduate or stay-at-home mother of three or corporate attorney or eighty-seven-year-old retiree or prison inmate or vice president of the United States and I am a big fan of your writing, especially your book “Hoot,” which was hilarious! Anyway, the reason for this letter is that I am looking for some guidance and I am hoping you can provide it. While not a published author myself, I have done some writing in my spare time, and my friends or parents or college professors or cell mates or goldfish or alien abductors have told me that my “tongue in cheek” style of humor reminds them of you. Mr. Barrie, I know you are a very busy person so I will “cut to the chase.” I am hoping you will take a look at the enclosed selection of my humorous essays or the 873-page manuscript of my comic novel about a corporate attorney who becomes involved in a series of wacky depositions or my collection of family Christmas newsletters from 1987 or the Akron, Ohio, Yellow Pages or my handwritten account of the many humorous events that occurred during my forty-three-year career in the field of dental implants. I am specifically wondering if you think that I have “what it takes” to “make the grade” as a “pro” writer and, if so, what steps I should take next? Would you be interested in “polishing up” my work for publication? I would of course give you “full credit.” Also would it be possible for you to put in a “good word” for me with your publisher? I understand that in order to get published, it’s a good idea to have an agent and I am hoping you can recommend one. I would also be grateful for any “tricks of the trade” you can pass along to a “rookie,” such as the “do’s and don’ts” of putting words inside “quotation marks.” Also I have developed this weird lump on my right elbow and I’m wondering if you think I should have it looked at. Thank you so much, Mr. Berrie!

Sincerely,
(Name)

P.S. Please write back soon because the lump is changing color.

We professional authors receive many letters like this. Whenever one arrives, we immediately drop whatever we are doing so we can analyze the letter writer’s specific situation and develop a detailed plan of action for his or her writing career. Bear in mind that this takes time. If you write to one of the more popular authors—James Patterson, for example, or the late Jane Austen—you need to be patient, as se phat they might be busy providing consultation services for other aspiring authors. Allow two weeks for your author to get back to you. After that, you should consider a follow-up letter or personal visit to your author’s residence to see how your career plan is coming along.

Your First Book Contract

Once your author has found you an agent and a publisher, you will need to sign a book contract, which is a lengthy legal document that says, “The Author warrants blah-blah-blah, etc.” Don’t worry about the exact contents of the contract. The only important thing in there is the size of your advance, which is a sum of money that the publisher pays you before you have actually written the book. That’s right: You get this money
up front
. I realize this sounds crazy. It’s like taking a college course where the professor gives you an “A” on a paper you haven’t even written yet. But there’s a sound logical reason for this system; namely, the book publishing industry has no idea what it’s doing.

The size of your first advance will depend on a great many factors. It should be around one million dollars.

Writing a Book

At some point during the decade after you sign the contract the publisher is going to start asking you whiny questions about when you expect to finish your book. “In your contract,” your publisher will say, “you specifically warranted that blah-blah-blah.” As if you, a busy professional author, are supposed to remember
every single thing
you sign!

But the point is, there may come a time when you have to physically write a book. This is the worst part of being a professional author because you have to sit around thinking up words for days on end, which is unbelievably boring. After you become more established, you can skip this pesky chore by doing what many top authors do; namely, think up book
ideas
but hire cheap foreign labor to write the actual books. If you go that route, make sure you read your book before you pass it along to the publisher because many foreign laborers don’t have a strong grasp of English and sometimes they will totally screw up your idea.

FACT:
The Hunger Games
, as originally conceived by the author, was supposed to be a three-book series on the historical impact of salad dressing.

But, as a rule, your publisher will expect you to write your first book all by yourself. This means you will have to choose a genre. For your first effort, I recommend that you write a children’s book. This genre has a couple of advantages. For one thing, you’re writing for children and children are, let’s face it, not the sharpest quills on the porcupine. You can write pretty much any idiot thing you want and they’ll be fine with it. Also, children’s books are typically just twenty-four pages long and consist almost entirely of large illustrations, so the total number of words you have to write is about the same as a standard grocery list.

FACT:
The average children’s book author works two hours per year.

The one important rule of children’s books is that they have to teach an Important Lesson. Here’s the basic format:

Merle Moth Does a Big Thing

Page 1: Merle Moth loved to eat.

Page 2: Eat! Eat! Eat!

Page 3: Merle ate socks.

Page 4: Merle ate coats.

Page 5: Merle even ate hats!

Page 6: One day, Merle saw a blue shirt.

Page 7: “I will eat this shirt!” he said.

Page 8: But Merle could not eat the shirt.

Page 9: “This shirt tastes bad!” Merle told his friends.

Page 10: “Because it is made from oil,” said Tyrone Toad.

Page 11: “What is oil?” said Merle.

Page 12: “It is a nonrenewable resource,” said Earlene the Endangered Fruit Bat.

Page 13: “Oh no!” said Merle.

Page 14: “Oil hurts the Earth,” said Carlos Cicada, who was transgendered.

Page 15: “Oh no!” said Merle again, for he knew the book needed to reach twenty-four pages.

Page 16: “Yes,” said Reggie the Lactose-Intolerant Raccoon. “We must save the Earth from oil!”

Page 17: “But I am so small!” said Merle. “How can I save the Earth from oil?”

Page 18: “I know!” said Farook the Differently Abled Muslim Sea Urchin. “You can fly deep into the ear canal of a petrochemical executive and tell him to stop hurting the Earth with oil!”

Page 19: And that is what Merle did.

Page 20: Soon the Earth was saved!

Page 21: Merle was happy.

Page 22: “I learned an Important Lesson,” he said. “Even if you are small, you can make a big difference!”

Page 23: “You can say that again!” said Antoine, a vegan amoeba of color.

Page 24: Everyone laughed and laughed. But not at anyone else.

The End

The downside to the children’s book genre is that—this is well known inside the publishing industry—it’s impossible to keep cranking out this kind of crap without turning to hard drugs.

FACT:
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
is actually about the author’s long, desperate struggle with crystal meth.

For this reason you might want to consider another low-workload, high-pay genre: poetry. There is BIG money to be made here because poetry is extremely popular with the American consumer. Bookstores literally cannot keep poetry books on the shelves. (This is why, when you go to a bookstore, you never see poetry books on the shelves.)

“Wait a minute,” I hear you saying. “Isn’t it hard to write a poem?”

It used to be. In the old days, there were strict rules requiring that poems had to rhyme and contain a certain number of syllables per line and be at least vaguely comprehensible to humans. Writing these old-style poems was backbreaking work, which is why the men who did it are virtually all dead today from various causes.

But then in the early nineteenth or twentieth century a group of brilliant young research poets working late at the National Poetry Laboratory accidentally mainlined some heroin and invented “free verse,” which is a kind of poetry that has no rules at all. Now any random clot of unpunctuated words could be a poem:

Suddenly

In the morning

always in the morning

the moment comes

when you are shuffling, sleep-slowed

down the dawn-dim hallway

shuffling in your nightdress

it comes

so sudden

so cold

so suddenly cold when it comes

the dog nose in your butt.

—T. S. E
LIOT

Free verse totally revolutionized the poetry industry. It meant that the entire lifetime output of an old-style poet such as Milton Wordsworth Longfellow could be equaled in a single afternoon by a bored homemaker with a bottle of zinfandel. The point is:
You can definitely do it.
And because of the high consumer demand for poetry, the money is
great
.