I published Barn Again in 2016, under my own made-up publishing imprint, Malarkey Books. After a while I started using Malarkey to publish other people’s work, and it started to sort of turn into an actual small press, and I felt like I should separate my books from it, honestly because some people have Opinions about small presses where one of the editors publishes their own books there, and I didn’t want that to become an issue or delegitimize the other books in some people’s eyes. So I made up Death of Print and decided to publish my books under that imprint, except I only actually moved The War on Xmas, a collection of stories, over to the new press, and Barn Again has just been lingering on my hard drive. I wanted to make some edits before re-releasing the book, and then somehow when I tried to get into that the only reliable file I had for it was a PDF and when I converted it to Word the formatting got all messed up. Something I could fix easy enough but I just never got around to it, and I haven’t felt compelled to prioritize it because I don’t really know if the book is even worth bringing back. I racked up ninety rejections before publishing it on my own, and there are times when I can sort of see why.
But anyway this is a chapter from the book that I think is pretty funny, or in parts is pretty funny. The narrator is Jonathan Barnard Jr. He’s a writer who was destined to be a midlister except his anger and impulse problems are always getting him into trouble, which gets him press, which leads to book sales. So in “Publish or Perish” he gets a call from his agent and . . .
Sulking after a rebuke from Sophie (“No, dad, I don't want to spend two weeks at wilderness survival camp even though it sounds funner than watching grass grow which is probably all they do there anyway.”) and reeling from some bad reviews (“I just couldn’t connect to the writing in spite of its polish and poise. Mr. Barnard is a prodigy of cantankerousness.”), I sat in my study drunk-reading Our Man in Havana when my agent called with three offers that could have made Graham Greene not only spin in his grave but claw his way out of it and disembowel me in my faded green armchair. (And what a zombie novel that would be.) Funner. The girl knows how to get me.
Before Cassidy gets down to business with me, she always tells me about some new book she’s repping. It’s not just chitchat. It’s a reminder, a friendly threat. “It’s a sort of cross-generic mash-up, basically it’s Jane Austen meets Austin Powers, with a little smattering of Elizabeth Wurtzel thrown in for attitude. It’s called For Bitchier or Poorer: A Homance, part of the Bitch in the City series. Oh, and speaking of Elizabeth Wurtzel . . . .” Cass had three options for me. I would hate them all, she said, but I had to pick one. We would both be handsomely compensated. I was behind schedule again, my soul at stake.
I don’t recall in what order she listed the three options, so I will invent an order here. Option 1: Amazon wanted to buy advertising space on my book jackets. Beaucoup dollars were available. Option 2: a Midwestern university was looking for a writer-in-residence. The money was good, not great, and I would have to teach two creative writing classes and organize a reading series. Option 3: I could judge a reality TV show. Serious dollars, this time, were available.
I demurred.
“Pick one, you fucking crank,” said my sunshiny agent. “Your books are great. They’re ground-breaking, riveting, shocking, sensitive, enlightening, hilarious, and all that fucking drivel, but they don’t sell, not consistently enough anyway. You need exposure. Short of killing someone or making a sex tape with Sarah Palin, these are your options. I am in touch with her agent by the way so something could probably be arranged.”
My agent had previously tried to lure me in to the cult of depression. “Write about your depression,” she told me. “Give the people what they want. One book, that’s all, and you can be as esoteric and quixotic as you want for the rest of your career. Not to mention reclusive. One good depression memoir will pay for Sophie’s college and Sophie’s children’s college. You can start a scholarship for manic depressive anarchists.”
“A man has to have a code,” I told her, “and my code doesn’t allow for the public airing of private agony. If this means readers can’t ‘relate’ to me, so be it.”
I owed her for this costly refusal, and so I agreed to do the TV show. She had two college-age children of her own.
The show had been my idea to begin with. It was a drunken idea, to be sure, but so many of the best ideas, like butt darts and representative democracy, have been drunken ones. About a year or so before this phone call I had spent a few weeks in New York. A producer at NBC called me up, saying he was a big fan, that we should do something together, and invited me to lunch. Our two-martini lunch turned into five or six, and when he asked me if I had any good ideas for a TV show I said, “Yes.” I’d recently aborted a satiric novel called Publish or Perish, wherein unpublished and unheard-of writers would be thrown together in a living space and forced to write. They would then present their work. A panel of respected judges would choose the best among them, and the losers each week would be kicked out on the street. The ultimate winner would be rewarded with a book deal. I didn’t get farther than a two-page outline and a few character sketches before giving up on the book, but it seemed like a good idea for a show, at least while I was drunk. The producer liked it immediately because it would be so obscenely cheap to produce. They could also do a book tie-in, a collection of the contestants’ stories, poems, and other material. The network could make a bundle and wouldn’t have to pay any royalties. I forgot about it before the check, which he picked up, even arrived.
So I signed on. The things I will do for my daughter. They put me up in a charmless but clean hotel in midtown. One could get used to New York living, if one lived in Manhattan within walking distance of one’s workplace. I could imagine living on the Upper West Side, walking to work on the Upper East Side. I love New York but am no fan of Brooklyn or the other boroughs and would have to do ten TV shows, turn my dust jackets into billboards, sell my Mickey Mantle rookie card and my first edition of Lolita, write a series of books about sexually confused hermaphroditic teenage vampires attending a Catholic high school in Stafford, Kansas, sell the TV rights to my life story, and turn tricks on Forty-second Street in order to become a New York writer. I was ashamed at first—not enough to back out, but enough so that I disguised the purpose of my trip, telling friends and family I needed to get off the mountain for a bit, soak up some culture, since I was thinking about setting my next novel in New York. I had a very ironic and condescending view of the show. Even though I was part of it I was somehow outside of and above it. What started out as sarcasm on my part turned, quickly enough, into earnestness, as I grew into my executive producer role and invented and modified word games to use as challenges. I had doubts about being in television, but I figured the network that let Alec Baldwin make a sex joke involving Condoleeza Rice and Abu Ghraib would at least try to let this show be what it needed to be. Instead they turned it into the malformed test-tube offspring of The Voice and Big Brother.
I came up with dozens of challenges on the two-day train ride to New York. Each week contestants would have to conquer these various challenges. Anyone who didn’t complete a challenge would be eliminated. If everyone completed the challenge, the judges would choose whom to eliminate. In one challenge, the players would write a thousand-word story using, without repeating, every Oxford English Dictionary word of the day from the previous year. In another, players would write a poem of at least thirty-one lines in blank verse. There was one that required them to write a Shakespearean sonnet about one of the judges. Then they would write a limerick for every member of the president’s cabinet. Another good one was “Name the character”: the judges provide details about a nameless character, and the players must invent a name that fits the person perfectly without being overly obvious or autological. For example, if I said, “Give me the name of an overweight born-again Christian stripper from Bartlesville,Oklahoma,” you might say Velvet Henryetta and have a pretty good shot at winning. I threw in some good word games, too, like “Can you give me a sentence?” Also “Replacement,” which requires players to substitute one word for another, then think of revised phrases. Instead of “three,” “perfunctory,” so you get the perfunctory stooges, perfunctory blind mice, two’s company, perfunctory’s a crowd, stranger than a perfunctory-dollar bill.
I envisioned a televised Algonquin Round Table; the suits picked up on this. One of them told me it was a show only Dorothy Parker and Christopher Hitchens would watch. They made a few changes, less wordplay, more drama. They even hatched a plan to release bedbugs into the contestants’ Brooklyn brownstone.
There are executive producers, and there are executive producers. My title was preceded by an understood “subordinate,” much like the way the word “you” is unsaid but understood in the imperative form, as when I said to the real executive producer, a tall, wan waif in a Men in Black suit, “(You) go fuck yourself.” He killed my geographical limerick challenge, in which players are given the name of a city and a person and have five minutes to compose an original limerick. The player with the funniest limerick gets a safety pass for the week and cannot be rejected. The producer asked for an example. I had composed an example limerick using Bangor and Elise:
There once lived a widow in Bangor
With an odd way of handling anger:
All the police
And a guy named Elise
Would line up fortnightly and bang ’er.
“Bang,” he said, was acceptable to use on television, but its association with a gang bang could be problematic, and it was likely the Bangor blue would take issue. We can use a different example limerick, I said, but no, there was too much risk. Television networks will risk offending Appalachians and college-educated women under the age of fifty, but not cops.
I had no end of trouble with this guy.
“I guess you could say you have a real Pynchon for conspiracy,” I said to a potential player who was obsessed with the Illuminati.
“I think the word you mean is ‘penchant,’” he said and laughed.
“All right then,” I said. “Fuck off.”
The producer chastised me. I told him I thought “fuck off” could be my catchphrase, which intrigued him until he ran it by someone upstairs who was less enchanted with the idea.
The show was probably doomed from the outset by a fundamental flaw I had not considered: the best writers are not always the best performers, and the best performers are even more frequently not the best writers. We were under pressure throughout the screening process to choose the quirkiest, brashest, most outlandish, best-spoken, best-looking contestants. There was no emphasis on talent. I’m not a copyright freak, but I’m glad NBC won’t release any of the footage.
I'll not pretend that I have a newfound, oldfound, or any other variety of respect for our legion of primetime talent show judges, but I must admit I now appreciate the difficulty of their jobs. It is hard to be mean to another human being who has not wronged you, who has done nothing except pursue their most cherished desire. Knowing how much I, who am not much of a celebrity, was paid for my brief judging stint, I have a feeling that the remuneration helps significantly in quashing the protesting sparks of humanity that must attack them when they humiliate their fame- seeking supplicants. No amount of money, however, could push me to the lengths the producers wanted us to go, and I am proud to say that my colleagues felt the same misgivings and were equally reluctant to revile the contestants, bad as so many of them were.
One of my favorites was Desiree, who specialized in writing humorous, facetious, or satirical Craigslist posts in response to weird ads she came across. Cassidy knocked down the director, one day, causing him to sprain his ankle, when a spindly young writer named Perry Allen Benjamin announced he was working on a novel about a bisexual vampire who adopts an autistic child named Squeaky. “Stop!” she screamed. “Cut! Ineligible!” She grabbed Perry by the hand and yanked him off the set to become her biggest client. “What the fuck?” shouted a producer. “You can’t poach our contestants.”
“I fucking can and I am. Listen, kid, you can either stay here and tug your dick with these goobers or come with me and make a million dollars.” I’m sure by now you’ve read The Vampire Spectrum, or seen the movie, played the video game, or eaten at the restaurant.
Then there was Claire, the transgressive transcendentalist, whose favorite writers were Chuck Palahniuk and Deepak Chopra. Her goal was to be a foul-mouthed purveyor of sick-and-twisted inspiration, but she made her living, a good one for an unknown writer, as a sock puppet for a right-wing social welfare organization, guerilla-editing Wikipedia entries, posting reactionary comments on websites and news stories, doing her best to fulfill Godwin’s Law, informing readers that Obama, like Hitler before him, is a socialist, that the Affordable Healthcare Act is a ploy to kill our grandparents so the government can save on Social Security costs, and that snow days are a liberal plot to kill Christmas. With her permission, here is one of my favorites: “Why do I hate Obama? Uh, because he’s black. And he’s a Democrat. And you know all they care about is tricking more and more young women into opening their legs so they get pregnant and then coercing them into having abortions so that rich Hollywood liberals can have their fetal-tissue smoothies.” She said she was politically more or less liberal, but she was in hock to Hunter College to the tune of $75,000 and thus not in a position to be scrupulous about how she earned her money.
“When I buy back my freedom,” she said, “I’ll hold myself to a standard. In the meantime I've got to find a way to afford Ramen noodles.”
I remember one contestant vividly, Geno, a Midwesterner of Italian extract (way back). He was short and squat, without being bulky. The executive producer loved him because he was able to draw out my inner demon. I asked him one of my standard questions: “What are five of your favorite books?” The more common questions, “What is your favorite book?” and “What are your top five favorite books?” are too restrictive. The best answer I’ve ever heard to the favorite book query was given by one of my professors at Mizzou: “Whatever I’m reading now.” One’s favorite book does not need to be a fixed entity; it can change from week to week or year to year. Asking what five of someone’s books are will get you a clearer, more complete picture of that person’s character, background, interests, desires, and so on. Geno’s answer flummoxed me: “I don't read much. I just write. I was born with a gift.” I glared at him for a few moments as I harnessed my wild urge to thrash him. I had encountered this response before; it was a fairly common position taken by certain MFA candidates I knew at CU. I had an analogy handy: “If I needed surgery, Geno, and the surgeon said to me, ‘I haven't actually studied much medical or surgical history, I just cut and sew people because I was born with a gift,’ I would tell him what I’m about to tell you: Fuck off.” That flummoxed him. “Go spend a week in the library, you arrogant twit.”
“Great,” sang out the producer. “Great! Great! But Johnny, watch the language, for the love of fuck, please. Let’s do it again!” Clap clap.
It wasn’t all work and whatnot. I got to go out on the town a bit. The network gave me free tickets to Only the Good Die Hard: The Die Hard Musical. (Sponsored, like Jeb Bush’s aborted presidential bid, the theme of which was “Right to Rise,” by Viagra.) The first day of the rest of John McClane’s life turns out to be more interesting than expected as terrorists take over the ex-cop’s new home, the Phoenix Nest Retirement Community in RoRo, Arizona. I would have preferred West Side Story or Blithe Spirit, but it was still better than Spiderman: The Debacle. I wasn't surprised that he could sing, but who knew Bruce Willis could dance? The man is as graceful as a hawk.
I had to get a new author photo. Cassidy insisted. She accompanied me to the shoot on Coney Island. “I want a picture,” she said to the photographer with her trademark McDonald-Mackenzie charm, “that will make women readers say to themselves, ‘This is the type of book I’d like to curl up with in front of the fireplace while the author is going down on me like a street dog on a takeout container.’” “You may not like it, Barn, this may seem like an inconvenience and a waste of time, but this is a fact: beautiful writers sell more books. Look at Franzen. You think people give a fuck about mildly comedic family dramas? He’s a beautiful nerd. Women want to fuck him, so they read his books. So quit bitching and get some fucking makeup on.”
I got called into my publisher’s office, which felt about like getting called into the principal’s office. They told me they wanted to do a book trailer for my memoir. A what? “A book trailer,” the intern’s assistant’s intern said. “It’s like a movie trailer but for books. You know, ‘In a world . . . where blah blah blah.”
“That sounds horrible. I’m not doing that.”
“It’s in the contract. This is your chance to have some input. Otherwise I’ll have my indentured servant write the script.”
So I went home and knocked out a script for the book trailer:
FADE IN
EXT. INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION - SPACE
A shot of space. We see the Earth. We HEAR ominous piano MUSIC.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
In a world.
Zoom in to the United States.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Where serious authors.
Zoom in to New York.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Have to make movie trailers to advertise their books.
Zoom in to a Barnes & Noble and a poster for Barn Again: A Memoir on the window. A gorgeous woman and sickeningly handsome man are staring at it in awe and nodding their heads.
DISSOLVE TO:
Green MPAA rating screen that appears before movie trailers. It looks just like
the normal screen but announces that the book advertised has been rated V forVOCABULARY.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
And satire is impossible because everything is already a parody of itself.
EXT. DESERT - DAY
A gruff-looking man stands in the desert.
This is the AUTHOR. He is disheveled with a scraggly beard. He wears a brown corduroy jacket and holds a bazooka.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
One man.
He aims the bazooka at the camera. We HEAR screechy high notes from the piano MUSIC. We see a succession of theAUTHOR’s mugshots.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Will find a way.
Crashing dramatic MUSIC.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
To sell books.
INT. BOOKSTORE - DAY
The man with the bazooka, without the bazooka now, signs books for a horde of hungry readers.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Action!
EXT. ANYWHERE - DAY
An explosion.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Adventure!
EXT. CLIFF - DAY
A random person hangs from a cliff. Abald eagle flies pastSCREECHING.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Alliteration!
EXT. STADIUM - DAY
A tuneless Elvis impersonator SINGS the national anthem over a
MONTAGE
A ragingwildfire.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
From the second-mostdangerous writer inAmerica.
An F-5 tornado destroying atown.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Comes the third-mostanticipatedmemoir.
A great white shark coughing up ashin.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Of the millennium.
A sea star with its guts out digesting a crab.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Barn Again-gain-gain-gain. AMemoir-oir-oir-oir.
An island of plastic in the ocean. Extremely dissonant MUSIC.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
By Jonathan.
A giant fishkill.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Barnard.
Snow-capped mountains.
NARRATOR (V.O.)
Junior.
FADE TO BLACK INSIDE A DOG’S WINKING ASSHOLE.
I don’t think they ever did anything with it.
When in Brooklyn, drink moonshine. A young assistant producer named Jessica who I like to think was trying to get in my pants took me to a nearby bar that specializes in craft moonshine. Jessica is a common name, but few Jessicas are common. There is no scientific explanation, but at least a supermajority (with one absolutely hideous exception I won’t describe) of the Jessicas I have known or met have been either quite attractive or flat-out beautiful, and this Jessica leaned toward the latter category. Erin is another magical name. I have been in love with about ninety percent of the Erins I have known. There could have been something between us, I imagine, had she not taken me to a nearby bar that specializes in craft moonshine. It wasn’t big news, but The New York Post had a brief but borderline libelous write-up about the foofaraw that ensued, if you want to learn more about it.
They had lined up two other authors so far, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Jennifer Weiner. They tried to get Jonathan Franzen, but the network blundered by signing his nemesis Weiner first. He was ready to sign on (so goes the rumor), if only to quit in protest midseason. They had asked Joyce Carol Oates, naturally, but it was not a good time for her. She had six novels coming out, was judging eight short story contests, all on top of her teaching duties, as well as the stress and sweat involved in launching her own perfume company and sports agency. I would be the least known author, but the execs liked my personality, “abrasive, abusive, possibly psychotic,” as one of them put it. I would be, they said, the show’s Simon Cowell. Footnote, please, future editor, about who he was.
Jonathan Franzen, if no one else, ought to appreciate the following story (I only recently got around to reading Freedom, which is what put me in a mind to share it). New Year’s Eve, 1999. My best friend Anthony was at a party at somebody’s pond. I wasn’t there, but I’ve read all the relevant transcripts. Kegs, fireworks, guns galore. Anthony wasn’t a redneck, but he had been seeing a girl who identified as one, and the partygoers were her associates. At ten seconds to midnight some thicknecked high-school dropout named Bo, in the preblackout stage of being blackout drunk, fired a shotgun in the air and shouted “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” One “Freedom!” for each shell in the shotgun. He reloaded it and fired two more rounds and shouted two more “Freedoms!” “Maybe,” said Anthony as Bo reloaded, “you shouldn’t—” Drunk Bo sneered at him and shouted “Freedom!” again, as loud as he could, stumbled forward, lowering the gun in the process, and fired—into my friend’s gut.
Bo Sixpack never went to jail; he still owns guns. Anthony’s family sued him, and he had to pay them a lot of money, which the family used to create a scholarship in their son’s name, but Bo is as free and careless as ever. These days he rides around flying a Confederate flag from his truck. Maybe I looked him up, watched him from the shadows the last time I was in the area.
The Redneck Antidefamation League points out, more or less rightly, that the redneck is basically the last class or group of people in this country that can be openly mocked. I’m not sure how I feel about that; I probably don’t mind. There are some redneck traits I respect, like the emphasis on self- reliance and love of family, but it’s also a culture that glorifies ignorance and riding lawnmowers. I’m going to get some letters from the John Deere people, but fuck it: there’s nothing self-reliant, certainly nothing “manly,” about riding lawnmowers. Real men use reel mowers. Anyway, there was a contestant named Bubba. I have a hard time believing his given name was Bubba, but that’s what he said. The producers and other judges loved him. No one was expecting a redneck. His presence triggered something ugly in me, something I didn’t like and didn’t want to deal with. I walked off the set and refused to come back until he was gone. He looked a bit like Bo, and sounded even more like him, but what enraged me more than anything was that you could tell that a big part of his personality was a put-on. He was an affected redneck, which is not a terribly uncommon occurrence, but of all the wannabes, the wedneck is the most disturbing and depressing. My old-fashioned pride wouldn’t allow me to renege on a deal, even one made in a stupor. (High words, you say, from a divorcé. The divorce wasn’t my idea.) But I wouldn’t come back on the set without written assurances that Bubba would not be a contestant.
Geno and Bubba were exceptions. It was almost impossible for me to be mean to the other contestants. (I never said a word to Bubba. I don’t want to relate the terrible things I said about him.) A young woman named Kaylyn recited for us one of the worst poems I have ever encountered (and I had two short-term girlfriends who were terrible poets). She was gorgeous; it was very clear (it was made clear to us by the producers) that she would make it into the brownstone. We were supposed to be vicious. I wanted to say that her poem sounded like it had been composed in Latin, badly translated into Aramaic, and badly retranslated into English, but instead I just said, “Wellllllll.” The producers hounded me about getting meaner, but I just couldn’t do it. Drunkenness had usually worked for me in the past, so I decided to try it again. I came to work drunk and fell asleep at the judges’ table.
The execs thought I was the right guy for this job because they’d seen some of my other television appearances, which were not characteristic of my everyday personality. I had been invited to speak on a number of television “news” shows in the two or three years before Publish or Perish, and although I hadn’t wanted to accept, I went on for the money. It’s hard to be thoughtful and respectful on television. Before every appearance I vowed inwardly to be calm, deliberate, but I’m a writer, not a talker. I never did debate in school; my beleaguered school didn’t offer debate, and only barely offered school, and I am easily touched and provoked. When I am able to avoid responding in anger I usually come off as unsure or uninterested because I am not natural on camera. I am focused more on my breathing than my demeanor or tone, too busy thinking up a cogent response, too busy thinking simultaneously not to fidget, roll my eyes, tap my fingers, scratch my head, look askance, or ogle that lovely producer across from me, and so I often give uninspiring answers. Or I come off smug when I answer nonchalantly, as when I challenged the Reverend Somebody, an irrelevant guest on one of the roundtable shows I did, a poorly educated expert on nothing other than how to fleece gullible dreamers out of millions; he told me, condescending, in response to I forget what, that “Jesus is the answer.” I fired back with a remark that would make a great bumper sticker: “Jesus is the easy answer.” I had a whole lot of people praying for me the next day, even more sending threatening and hateful emails. “I can understand,” I then said, a propos of his remark, which was about as relevant to our topic as modern poetry is to modern life,“why people are still attracted to religion. It’s easy. It’s static. It’s comforting because it will always be the same. We have busy, complicated lives. It’s too much work to pay attention to science, which is always replacing old beliefs with new ones. I can understand why people do a lot of seemingly inexplicable things, like beat their children. Life is hard, rents are high, children are sometimes, rather quite often, really, annoying—I can understand why, but I don’t approve. Slapping your kid is an easy, gut reaction, but it’s not healthy. Clinging to a creation story is an easy, gut reaction, easier than trying to master biology and physics, but it’s not healthy. The scariest thing about science is that it can’t eliminate or offset death. If you believe in heaven, you can at least attempt to ignore death or pretend that there’s a way around it. Take away God and heaven and all that, and death is a little more tangible, so to speak. It’s fuh—shit, I almost said ‘fucking,’ sorry—pretty goddamn terrifying. When faced with the choice to accept death on its own terms or indulge in an ancient fantasy, a lot of people still opt for fantasy.”
That was one of my better speeches, at least in terms of delivery. I didn’t stammer or pause long and awkwardly or repeat myself or sound unsure. I nearly forgot, in that extemporaneous moment, that I was on television; it was the closest I ever came to acting natural on camera.
I specialize in fish-out-of-water stories because even on this great blue planet I feel, if you can imagine, like a fish in a waterless universe, not the most scientifically sound figure of speech. I have never felt more out of place, in the wrong skin, than in a TV studio. The more practice I get, the more uncomfortable I feel. I say this in case any television producers are reading: I am not a good idea. Do not have me on, do not hire me as a highbrow host.
I wept after I got the call about my first book, cried so hard I can’t think of a simile. I couldn’t even get the phone back in its cradle. My agent hung up on her end, after congratulatingme again, and I doubled over and collapsed, possessed by emotion, a crybaby Pazuzu convulsing in a heap on the kitchen floor. The girls were terrified. Maddie, assuming my mother had been killed in the most absurd and horrific manner, ran over to comfort me. She tackled and bearhugged me, bloodying her celestial nose on my titanium noggin. These were not tears of joy. When you have been under constant intense pressure for an extended period of time, studying, scrimping, working hard for low pay, caring for a baby, losing sleep, wondering how you’ll pay the rent or buy groceries, questioning your abilities and decisions, languishing, rotting on the inside, wondering how long a family can live this way, even a little bit of relief is going to make you break down. It was rather like winning the lottery, albeit not the megasuperjackpot, except you’ve got better odds when you play the lottery, especially these days. I doubt whether I could have ever even landed an agent in today’s book market. I am not ashamed of my tears. Ashley Montague, The American Way of Life:
“To be human is to weep. The trained inability of any human being to weep is a lessening of his capacity to be human – a defect that usually goes deeper than the mere inability to cry. And this, among other things, is what American parents – with the best intentions in the world – have achieved for the American male. It is very sad. If we feel like it, let us all have a good cry – and clear our minds of those cobwebs of confusion, which have for so long prevented us from understanding the ineluctable necessity of crying.”
I had grown rather depressed, to use a lifeless clinical word, in the months before I got my book deal, and the good news was almost too much to bear.
I probably don’t even deserve my success. I only got a book deal out of pure chance. David Foster Wallace reigned; Dave Eggers was ascendant. Publishers were looking for the next funny, quirky, verbose literary virtuoso, and it seemed for a while that I was it. I admire the abovementioned Daves, but I am not them. My first novel differed stylistically from the rest of my work; I hadn’t fully developed my style yet. Malarkey doesn’t end in the middle of a sentence like Broom of the System, but it still doesn’t end in any really satisfying or conventional sense, and the book is full of puns, asides, rare facts, and highfalutin fart jokes. It was called post-postmodern, but it was really an old-fashioned cock-and-bull story. Critics expected my second novel to be the next Infinite Jest, and instead I gave them Russian Thistle, gritty, bitter, and sarcastic, “filled,” as a writer from The New York Times put it, “not with verbal pyrotechnics but verbal pyromania.” I wanted to get that quote on the book cover, but my publisher wouldn't go for it. It was only possible for me to get noticed by a major publisher in that brief window of time, between 2001 and maybe 2003. If I had come along earlier I would have languished, any later and I never would have found an agent. I don’t know how a writer who doesn’t know anyone in the industry and doesn’t give a fuck about vampires or young adult fantasies is ever going to get noticed. It might be possible, before today’s window closes, for an unknown writer to gain success with a trilogy about a society of misunderstood and much-maligned but beautiful nymphomaniac goblins living in a subterranean Court of Miracles in the tunnels below New York City. You might call it Sex Under the City.
One morning I got a call from a new exec. The old one had been fired. Publish or Perish had perished. The cancellation crushed me. I had been, at least initially, so critical and dismissive, had hated the show and felt ashamed, but now that it was dead I felt cheated. I took the subway up to Central Park. I ended up first in Coney Island because, troubled by a wall-sized advertisement I had seen for a book called Pride and Prejudice and Pedophiles, I got on the wrong train. I wandered around that glorious park, paying more attention to the birds than the people. I wound up near the roller skating area on the east side of the park. I was worn out and hungry so I bought an ice cream and sat in the bleachers to watch the rolling anachronisms, except as I watched I became entranced. They were magical. They all looked absurd, of course, and there were men there who had apparently not bought new clothes since 1992. They danced and skated to MC Hammer music from a boombox. Some wore in-line skates, but many wore the classic rink roller skates. The thing that hooked me was that they all looked so natural. I would have been too self-conscious and embarrassed to even leave the house with a pair of roller skates, but these people, grown folks, were happy and comfortable. They were engaged in an activity that society deems useless and out of fashion, and if they noticed they didn’t care. Some of the skaters were as great at their art as Michael Jordan and Michelangelo were at theirs. I’m unable to articulate the exact line of reasoning, but as I watched those skaters I grew nervous and nauseated, the way you feel when you know you have to do something essential and important that you don’t want to do, courage sickness. I bounded out of the bleachers and raced down to Rockefeller Center. I blagged my way upstairs and then forced my way into the new boss’s office. “I won’t let you do it,” I said. “These kids deserve a shot. It might be bad television, but it’s better than most television, and it’s the right goddamn thing to do, goddamn it. Fuck it.” It’s hard to say whether the look he gave me was icy or stony—maybe it was the look of an icy stone. “Fuck it, I said,” I said. “And fuck you if you think I’ll let you trash this show. It’s their only chance.” I am fit and strong but no match for four thick security guards.
It was an absurd show, a silly way to make a nut, but it could have changed someone’s life, it is probably the last way a completely unknown literary writer with no connections, celebrity, or following could ever get a book deal, and it’s gone, stillborn. I would have been embarrassed, but I wish, for the sake of the winners we didn’t find, we could have seen it grow.