YGB was standing over the publisher’s desk and he was asking Myron with some earnestness if not solicitude if he was feeling all right. His glassy eyes and tousled appearance must have prompted his editor in chief to inquire. His had been a dark and stormy night. Mine had been a dark and stormy morning after Junior’s email.
“Myron, you hear me? Something wrong, Myron?” said YGB.
“Myron, what fuck the fuck? You look like shit?” I said—as you recall.
Yes, something was obviously terribly wrong. Something had happened that had never happened before to him with a book. It was love at first sight.
✴✴✴
“You get what I’m saying, Sibella?”
I fucking did not.
“Yes?” I said.
It wouldn’t be long before I perused the manuscript that had knocked him senseless. I would have to await my opportunity to tell him that he had lost his fucking mind.
This was not going to work out as Myron planned, of that much I was Surebella. And back then I was thinking that if a book about him ever saw the light of day, I had the perfect title: Sibella Seeks New Employment.
Sibella with the
Dragon Tattoo
Hang in with me, please. You need to understand Myron in order to appreciate the chaos about to confound us—which had everything to do with a certain manuscript.
He prided himself on the artfulness of his wicked rejection notes. But as he instructed his acquisition editors, be as harsh as you wish with an author you think he should publish. If it’s somebody he would not publish on a bet, be sweet as pie. Isn’t it pretty to think so? These were the sage, courteous, professional instructions he himself failed to heed. This is why he delighted in composing rejection letters and emails that perfectly spoke his mind. Actually, I was the one who took his chair and did the typing—again, on account of his alleged carpal tunnel—about which, between you and me, I had my accent grave doubts. Maybe he simply liked having me nearby, or maybe he wanted me to admyron his handiwork.
Your love scenes made me stab myself in the legs with a letter opener.
The Wall Street Journal reports that your narration may well drive the blow job industry into Chapter 11.
If you mail me another manuscript, I will tell Whitey Bulger where to find you.
Stick to your double-entry accounting or Uber-driving or bagging and tagging at the morgue.
I’ve heard snappier dialogue at the bottom of the pool.
I can’t tell who I despise more—your overcoddled cats or your overpampered kids.
Enclosed is a free scrip: medication could not possibly diminish the impact of your talent—and neither could a well-placed hammer to my cranium.
Special Forces mention of the Nordstrom’s cosmetics counter girl generator of a suspected seventy-nine page novelette featuring a fashion-forward band of anorexic community college private eyes who may or may not be saucy wenches but who definitely rock facials and great exfoliation techniques—that was the honest-to-God narrative premise—to whom he drafted the following: I was tempted to publish your book on the titillating grounds that you composed possibly the best worst sentence in the glorious history of the English language: “The eating of these girls are unhealthy.”
Here’s the thing, and you’ll probably not understand this yet, but hear me hear me: “Sibella, I truly was tempted.”
✴✴✴
Then there were the books he selected for publication. Careful what you wish for, conspiring author. It was the medium-rare writer who did not ultimately yowl that Myron was (drum roll, please) controlling.
Oooh, ah, no, please, not that, not that, I’m cut, I bleed.
Shut the fuck up, all you male and female pussies, if I may quote I know who. They tweeted and blogged about him without signs of let up or advanced literacy. They contended he had tectonic-plate-size character flaws, but that would imply he was in possession of one of those pesky things, a character. Yes, he drank too much. They contended he was as lazy as a three-toed book pubslothcist. Because you see, he paid no attention to particulars. For what they called crucial details (Please send an advance copy to my wife who left me saying I would never amount to shit), he called petty annoyances (You truly think this meager book of yours proves otherwise, hotshot?). Yes, he mercilessly flattered the commendably striving (independent book store owners, God love ’em) and the criminally self-indulgent (reviewers and advertisers) because he saw no way around exploiting them. Yes, he was untrustworthy, disloyal, dishonest. Yes, his mockery reduced to tears his vendors and his sales staff. He should have been thrown into prison, though sometimes he thought solitary confinement would amount to being a relief. At the very least, he should have probably dry-cleaned his ragu-stained blazer and recycled decades ago his George Plimpton-on-meth hairpiece of a coiffure that for a while he used to sport for ceremonial occasions. If he had any children, they would have disowned him. If he still had a wife he would have betrayed her by sleeping with her best friend—sort of like how his ex kind of did cheat on him. As for friends—
“I have friends I haven’t even used yet, Sibella.”
Touché, all you yeast-infected malcontents, Myron saluted you. Send him your wretched manuscripts. If you were fortunate, he would make you flush enough to hate him all the way to the bank.
✴✴✴
Here’s a sweet little fantasy in which he indulged. And no, it was not his everyday kind of fantasy (the one that involved some implausible tag-teaming of Monica Bellucci, Penelope Cruz, and Beyoncé). That was a big sweet Praying Mantisy.
(You want to complain about my TMI? How about Myron’s?)
In this daydream of his, a striving but dismissible writer, desperately handkerchiefing for an ounce of acclaim or recognition, in mortal frustration goes to a fortune-teller, who allows him to ask one question.
“Oh, Madame Voyant, will I ever be famous?”
She peers into her crystal ball, rubs her eyes, and grins. “Yes, indeed, you will one day be world-famous.”
He is ecstatic. “I knew it. I knew all the lonely hours of labor and the two-packs-a-day chest cough would be worth it.”
“What the heck,” the seer announces, “two for one sale today. You may ask me one more question.”
“When?”
He had idiotically used up his second question, but she was feeling sympathetic. “You may ask your second question now.”
“Thanks, Madam. I mean, when will I be famous?”
“Oh, let me look… Ah, I see… You will be universally recognized to have always been a genius, the greatest writer of the century, on the day you die.”
“Yes!” cries the exultant, unclear-on-the-concept, soon-to-be ex-author. For in his jubilation, he giddily darts out of the fortune-teller’s house and into the street, where he is splattered by the crosstown bus and his name instantly becomes legend.
✴✴✴
A clarification as to the “small” in his previously articulated description of his small independent press. In comparison to the industry Brobdingnagians on the Mystic Isle of Manhattan, Hard Rain was indisputably Lilliputian. (Read a damn book someday, why don’t you, Kelly?) He may not have had an impressive New York City address in the Flatiron or on Fifth Avenue. No, we were located in a nondescript twelve-story office building downtown.
To judge solely on the basis of the antiseptic scents and free-floating anxiety in the air, all the periodontists of San Francisco were holed up here with their jaws-pried-open captives. There were also various accountants, caterers, shrinks, and a crow’s murder of “consultants.” I never get what consulting means, or “life-coaching,” which I probably could use, you are doubtless thinking. These consultants had chest-puffing, vague names that all sounded like The Blue Man Group, so I figured they were mostly trafficking in high-tech weaponry or guiding private school head searches for Packe
r, Brearly, Trinity, Dalton, and my alma mater, Spence.
In any case, Hard Rain operated out of six adjoining closet-sized offices and one conference room, everything lit up by fluorescent bulbs, and we had one lumbering table that could serve as an abattoir’s butcher board, which is not a bad metaphor because that’s where Myron chopped it up during editorial meetings and told us what we were deciding. So, yes, we were small and unimposing indeed. Dynamite and MDMA come in small packages, too. But here’s the thing. You wouldn’t believe how much money his privately held company made, and that’s all right because it’s none of your fucking business and he was never going to tell you.
But he did tell me.
“You’re fucking kidding.” That was me, gobsmacked, having heard the numbers.
What did Myron do with what my dad called, inscrutably to me, the “bread”?
Let’s put it this way about Mr. Big Stuff: one New Year’s he sent the entire overdecompensating staff (more upside to having a shrink dad: psycho jargon) to Las Vegas, all expenses paid, including first-class airfare and a couple of thousand in walking around money. Ask me, they should promptly resume atomic bomb testing on the Las Vegas Strip, but that’s another subject. Year before, it was New Year’s in Maui, same thing. And, no, he didn’t accompany his crew. He relished the solitude and the quiet. Something tells me all of them enjoyed not being in his environs for a few blissful days. And this year’s lumps of coal? Excuse me? Try criminally costly Bottega Veneta briefcases, where he stashed Missoni scarves. Complicated zigs-when-he-oughta-zag fellow, Mister Myron Beam.
In sum: “I was born to be a publisher.”
I am not sure what his talent entailed, but whatever it was maddened and mystified his competitors. He unerringly selected books he believed the testicle-deficient big houses were too timid to risk publishing, enamored as they were of their own silly self-fulfilling metrics and scared-bunny forecasts. Some critics say the mainstream rich publishing houses underestimate the reading public, but they’re wrong. To quote Myron, they don’t underestimate them enough. In any case, King Myron generated royalty statements and issued checks in timely fashion (thereby never jeopardizing licensing rights), strangling the sub-rights into submission. That’s something his greedy writers should care about: their own personal bottom-line.
But, no, inedibly enough, that’s not the case. Believe it or not, what they ultimately craved was Myron Beam’s devotion, what they ultimately desired was Myron Beam’s admiration, what they ultimately needed was Myron Beam’s abiding personal interest in their lives and their alleged creative processes. Are all writers nuts? You betcha, as Sarah Fucking Palin might say, a nut job who wanted to be president and who “wrote” a fucking bestselling book but never read one. Maybe the big houses did accidentally underestimate the public.
✴✴✴
In fact, one publication of his stood at or near the top of the national charts for more than a hundred gynecologized weeks. Of course, this was back in the good old memoir salad days of yore (psychopathic parents, wall-to-wall pharmaceuticals, misty conversions, naked and heroic Tantric Yoga teachers, Celebrations of Nature and Fly Fishing, promiscuous motorcycle repairs, empathic stray dog or friendly wolf emergence, and so on). Godlike Oprah practically levitated with delight during the author’s appearance on her show.
“God, I miss when Oprah ruled the world,” he said more than once.
Thus it came to pass that Myron became the envy of the publishing world. Every now and then the brass of one of the conglomerated big boy houses in New York flew out and took him to places like The French Laundry in Napa Valley for dinner (try to get a rezzie, but think next decade, and after mortgaging your house to pay the freight) and made an offer with lots of zeroes to buy him out. They said things like, You have captured lighting in a bottle. Which was true. One cannot not argue with the obvious unless you work for the New York Knicks. Thus he would drink their first-growth Bordeaux and consume their tall, sustainable, locally sourced food, but he always took a pass on a proposed deal. What would he have done with himself if he weren’t the publisher of his company? He was not in it for the money. Yes, don’t be ridiculous, he craved all the money he made, but that’s not the point.
“What’s your secret?”
“Fuck if I have a clue, Sibella?”
If he had been a gracious gent, if he had had a single magnanimous bone in the temple of his beleaguered, undepilated (except for the top of his head) body, he might have thrown some credit onto his gifted authors and his crackerjack staff, including one junior editor.
I overheard one day an exchange between him and the social media guru, who was named—what else?—Caprice.
“You handle the social media stuff, right?” For a micromanager, he lost track of an astounding number of details (like other job titles).
She nodded, but then she wouldn’t recognize a cop’s trick question if she were shackled for running a three-card monte game in Times Square.
“What is it exactly that you do?”
Her bottle-blonde pageboy cut was a little too darling, if you know what I mean, but between us girls I wished I could wear my unmanageable hair that way. My dusky, wavy mop top combined with my chipmunk cheeks and elongated face severely restricted options in the salon and in my dating life. I sacrificially burned out a few intrepid flat irons before I gave up and experimented with a buzz cut. Now I warily watch my hair grow Chia-plant-like.
Yet to her or her life coach’s credit, Caprice was not as dismayed as anybody else might have been by Myron’s query, and he wasn’t being hostile, and it wasn’t truly a trick question—he wanted to know what was the nature of the work she did. But watch this. She actually fucking told him. She talked for five straight minutes, a thousand tweets’ worth of nonsense, without taking a single breath. At the conclusion of her peroration, he thanked her sincerely.
When Caprice left her desk with iPhone in hand to do presumably some of that essential social media work or to go to the bathroom—or both, being a multitasker—he approached my crates, where I sat with eyes and mouth wide open, as if I had witnessed a wreck, which I sort of did.
“You heard Caprice? I didn’t understand a thing she said?”
“Neither did I?”
“Just checking?”
Anyway—and that’s a feeble transition I would cut the fuck out of any ms I was editing—in the staff’s spare time when they were not playing games online or stealing music, they also pored over manuscripts that come in over the transom, a term whose etymology I pretended to understand. Must be a Britishism. When in doubt, it’s British; when it’s not, French. I have been known to have a tough time around the tea-sipping hundred-buck-bangers-and-mash UK gulag. You get stockaded at the London Book Fair sometime and you’ll back me up.
“When a dog journeys,” Murmechka might say, “he has no pockets and comes back with stories he wishes he could tell.” Most of her proverbs involved the animal world—predominantly a certain Mr. Coyote—but I was philosophically resistant to her casual attitude in regard to non-homo sapien protagonist cultural appropriation if not exploitation as well as her default lunch order from the downstairs deli: tongue sandwiches, whole wheat, no mayo or mustard. Never mind the tongue, and never mind that it wasn’t Katz’s downstairs, but how could somebody eat a self-disrespecting sandwich minus mayo and mustard?
✴✴✴
If you really want to hear about it, Kelly, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is all that David Copperfield kind of crap, which I think qualifies as a double-barrelled collusion. Spoiled alert: you’re not going to be rewarded on that score. His childhood was, to him and to anybody not trying in vain to publish their latest verse epic in iambic pent-up-ameter, a nonevent. According to him, he did make an effort to remember primal moments, figuring he must have had a childhood, as who doesn’t have one? That was what prompted him to see for a while a classi
cally trained psychoanalyst, goatee and couch and white noise machine and all. Therapy proved a bust. The shrink periodically nodded off during Myron’s Buster Keatonish silences. The psychodynamic moral of Myron’s story might be this: his real life began the day he conceived of Hard Rain Publishing.
The second thing you’ll probably want to know is, where did he get the big dough? (Duh, that’s where my dad’s “bread” comes in!) He wasn’t a member of the Columbia Cartel and didn’t reprise the clever visionary the world came to know as Signor Ponzi, but there could be some discussion on that sensitive subject later on, we shall see. Otherwise, drat, he didn’t enlighten me on that matter, or unlock his ledgers for me. But wherever it was he found the capital, by whatever the means he came by it, he threw everything into the company he created out of whole cloth in a down, down, down market.
“The rest is history?” I guess.
Speaking of money—and if you are ever in doubt as to the functional import of Myron’s remarks—whenever his publisher lips moved he was speaking about money. People harbor many misconceptions about the book business and about Myron, but one thing everybody knows is this: publishing ain’t cheap. When he first started his company, he said he figured he could count on a nice little yearly loss for tax purposes as well as unbridled access to gratuitous tail. Unsavory, but true, let us all with a long face concur.
Well, how did that work out?
I will tell you what he told me. As for tail, honestly, not so much.
“I am, I think the word is celibate?”
“What? You’re a Jewish Catholic monk?”
Not quite, and he explained, in graphic detail I may have to share with you, he was, well, “important.” As his copyeditor I would strike out that typo and replace it with impotent. Moving on quickly now.
Sibella & Sibella Page 5