I noticed in one photo a young, pretty woman seated behind a table stacked with books, which I presumed she’d written, holding up a copy, and smiling wanly. Her name was visible on the book’s cover—Ondrea Wales—and after a quick Google search, I found my way to her website. She’d written three teen novels for a major publisher, and in her author photo looked confident and bright. I dropped her an e-mail: Investigating Lon Hackney and “Future Is Now” conferences. Please call. My phone rang the next night—Ondrea.
“It was one of the most humiliating days of my life,” she told me. “I’d been hearing from so many people that these days publishers don’t have the resources they used to, that if you want your book to get out there, you have to do it yourself. I paid five hundred dollars for that table, and sold two books the whole day. It was a disaster.” Ondrea told me that she was the only one there who hadn’t self-published their book or put it out through a vanity press. The most embarrassing moment of her day was when an editor from another publishing house had wandered by and stopped to chat. “She was aghast that I was out there—she thought my publisher had set it up. I confessed that I’d set it up myself, and she just kind of smiled at me like I was a crazy person and walked away. I felt duped. I felt lied to. The whole thing had been misrepresented to me in every way.”
She got a little upset, just thinking back on it all, but her voice was sweet, even silky, and as we talked on, I gazed at Ondrea’s author photo on her website, aware of the beginnings of a crush, the tips of my fingers tingling. I asked her if she felt so out of place simply because she was an established author surrounded by self-published folks, and she said no, that wasn’t it. “It’s not that I didn’t belong there because I thought I was better than the other authors,” she said. “It’s because nobody belonged there. The awards gala was a joke. Everybody was disappointed.” A conference aimed toward self-published authors could still be dignified and inspiring, she said, but this one lacked even the slightest semblance of anybody’s effort or care. No press, no promotion. People had come from all over the country, only to get up on stage and read for ten minutes to a crowd of three. Twenty thousand people? There might’ve been twenty thousand people in Golden Gate Park that day, she said, but there were never more than a couple dozen at the bandshell. Ondrea lived in New York City, and she’d flown to San Francisco to participate. One guy she’d met, a children’s book writer, had traveled all the way from Belgium. “He was really disconsolate,” Ondrea said. “But he—and all of us—tried to put on a brave face, at least till we got home. Who wants to admit that they’ve been scammed?”
We talked for another forty-five minutes, the longest conversation I’d had with anyone since Sarah had left for California. Ondrea was likable, upbeat, thoughtful, and perceptive, and apparently a fairly successful writer with a healthy dose of talent—the kind of girl I often fantasized about meeting. I thought of Lon Hackney, that piece of shit, and my swollen ankle pulsed and throbbed. It was one thing to gyp my dad for a couple hundred bucks, it was another to put sweet, darling Ondrea Wales through a day of hellish awkwardness and shame.
“How’d you get interested in all of this, anyway?” asked Ondrea, a flirtatious note of curiosity creeping into her voice. I told her my dad had been suckered in, and explained that I’d been sending hate mail to Lon Hackney, without mentioning any specifics.
“I met Lon,” she said.
My ears perked up. “Yeah? What was he like?” I hadn’t been able to find any pictures of him online, I told her.
“He was—and look, I don’t have anything against fat people—but he was a fat, sweaty slob.”
I laughed nervously. My bedroom was as hot as a sauna, and I was sticky with sweat; I hadn’t showered in a week and hadn’t shaved in two. “Really?” I squeaked.
“Yeah,” said Ondrea. “He could tell I was on to him, and he avoided me the whole day.”
“He’s got to be stopped,” I said. “Listen. Ondrea. I’m gonna stop him.”
“Yes, Davy!” she cooed. “My hero.”
*
I flew to San Francisco. It was November, and I could walk again, sort of, but only short distances and with great pain. My mission was twofold—visit Sarah and beg her to come home with me to Michigan, and confront Lon Hackney and dump a bottle of pee on his head. That was my actual plan—to dump pee on his head, and let him know that I was doing it in the name of all the writers he’d ever fucked over.
I’d thought I would surprise Sarah, but when I called to tell her I was in the Bay Area for a week, she told me she was camping with Ghostshrimp in the Redwoods and wouldn’t be back for five days. While I waited for her to return, I turned my focus to stalking Lon Hackney. His office was just a few blocks from my friend Eli’s apartment in the Lower Mission, where I was staying. I shuffled my way over around three in the morning after a long night with Eli at the Peacock Bar, just to scout things out.
The headquarters of the Times Square Literary Agency (and Lon’s entire trick deck of business ventures) were housed, I discovered, in a single dingy office among a block of six others above a liquor store and a tanning salon. A flight of exposed concrete steps led upstairs from the parking lot to an outdoor T-shaped corridor, with a row of office doors on either side, numbered with faded stickers from a hardware store. I found Suite #4. After all those months of sending flat-rate boxes to the address on Mission Street, it was a rush to actually be there, outside the door where my pee bottles had been delivered. The shades were drawn, and for all I knew nobody had been there in months, though a handwritten label remained affixed to the mail slot that said: LH LITERARY SERVICES/FUTURE IS NOW—Lon’s umbrella groups. The mail slot’s inside duct kept me from spying into the room, but I was able to peek down at the floor, where a mid-sized pile of manila envelopes and bubble-wrapped packages lay spread on the worn carpet, like a Christmas haul prepped by elves from Staples. I could read a few of the return addresses—Guymon, Oklahoma; Key West, Florida; Regina, Saskatchewan—enough to confirm the reach of Lon’s operation. It was late, I’d had plenty to drink, and I had to pee, but had no bottle to piss in. I looked around to make sure I was alone, unzipped, and peed straight onto the door of Lon’s office—one of the most enormously pleasing whizzes I’d ever taken. Then I headed back to Eli’s place.
Over the next few days, I visited Lon’s offices a dozen times, hoping to cross paths with him. In a plastic bag, I carried three bottles of pee in Vitamin Water bottles in case we met face-to-face. I tried to imagine how he might respond as I doused him—would he run? Would he fight? But as the days passed with no sign of him, I began to fear that his office visits were few and far between. Maybe he’d glimpsed me from the parking lot, lingering outside his office door, and had known to stay away. Mail accumulated on the floor of his office. My pee bottles were too big to fit through the mail slot, but one night I left one wedged between the knob of his office door and the door jamb, and another balanced atop it. It was one thing for him to receive pee bottles in the mail—deranged threats shipped from the Midwest—but it gave me an evil thrill to picture him arriving at his office and finding my bottles waiting for him, creepy as tarantulas, announcing my arrival in California.
When I showed up the next morning, I saw that the bottles were gone, and my heart flim-flammed at the idea that he’d returned to his post, and was in there, on the other side of the door. But his office was dark, and through the mail slot, I saw that all the packages were still heaped on the floor. Most likely, the bottles had been chucked out by the old Bangladeshi woman who owned the building and ran the liquor store below, or her teenage grandson, who halfheartedly swept the parking lot every day at dawn and at dusk. I’d asked them one afternoon about Lon, telling them he was an old friend I was trying to get in touch with, but they’d noticed me skulking about gimpily the past few days and seemed to sense my darker intentions. After conferring in Bengali, the grandson turned back to me and said, “Sorry, boss, we don’t see him much. But I got you
a case of those Orange Mango Nantucket Nectars you were asking about.”
Sarah returned from her camping trip and called me, and we made plans to hang out the next day. “What do you want to do?” she said. “Go to bookstores? See a movie? You ever been to the Cartoon Art Museum?”
“I need your help,” I told her. “It’s a stakeout.”
Sarah brought disguises—a tiger mask for her, glasses-with-giant-nose-and-bushy-mustache for me. We sat for hours on a pair of overturned buckets in the alleyway beside the liquor store, within sight of the cement steps from the parking lot to the offices upstairs. Anytime someone disappeared up the steps, Sarah raced over, tiptoed after them, then emerged a minute later, shaking her head: “Not our guy.” We played Go Fish, worked on Word Search puzzles from a gigantic book, filled out Mad Libs, and munched wasabi nuts, while I drank mango juice and a half pint of R & R whiskey, and Sarah sipped a jug of chocolate milk through a tiny straw. I was still in love with her, and told her so plenty of times over the course of the afternoon, and she found ways to politely deflect my advances without making me feel too crummy. She even tolerated me squeezing her knee, kissing her ears, and resting my head on her shoulder. “Come back to Michigan,” I said, my voice crackling with emotion. “Let’s just try this one more time. Come home, Sarah.”
She jumped to her feet. “Did you see that? The mailman! He’ll know something.” She dashed across the alley and up the stairs. I waited, hunched on my bucket, swirled in the hot shrieks and honks of rush-hour traffic. When she came back, she told me what the mailman had said: he’d met Lon once or twice but almost never saw him in the office. Often, packages arrived that were too big to fit through the mail slot, and he’d leave them for Lon with the accountants in Suite #6. “I knocked on their door,” Sarah said. “I thought they might know when he’d be back. But they already left for the day.”
“You’re really not gonna come back home with me?” I asked her.
“I can’t,” she said. “I love you, but I’m happy out here, I’m happy with Ghostshrimp. We’ve got Keenan and Banksy”—their dogs—“we’ve got the apricot trees, we’ve got the Draweteria.” This was their daily art project where Ghostshrimp whipped up illustrations and Sarah colored them in; they sold the results on his website, often for hundreds of dollars. “Don’t cry,” she said, putting her arms around me. “Everything’ll be okay.”
“I’ve got to take a leak,” I said, my heart twisting. “I’ll be right back.” I scooped up my empty half-pint R & R flask and limped up the steps to Lon’s office door. Lights were on in some of the adjacent offices, but I was slightly buzzed and by that point of my West Coast visit no longer gave a fuck—I dropped trou and filled the slender liquor bottle with pee. Someone poked their head out of a door and quickly slammed it shut. A moment later, the Bangladeshi woman from the liquor store came rushing up the steps, shouting at me and waving a cordless telephone. “I’m calling the nine-one-one!” she shouted. “Police come. It’s ringing right now! You must go. You must go.”
“Okay, okay,” I shouted back, buttoning my pants, feeling like a mutant superhero who has only good intentions but is generally viewed as a freak. Quickly, I tightened the cap on the bottle and launched it through the mail slot into Lon’s office. I rushed past the old woman, my ankle flaring with pain.
“Don’t come back here!” she hollered after me. “Only for office workers and their guests. Want to go to jail? No thieves allowed!”
A fuse lit within me. I turned and exploded on her: “Thieves? Lon Hackney’s the thief! Your tenant, Lon Hackney. A criminal! You’re harboring criminals here. You’re sheltering an extortionist. You’re complicit! Look, I’m a fucking police officer. Want me to call the FBI?”
She looked at me tiredly, unimpressed by my wild, nonsensical lies and impotent threats. For a police officer, I supposed, the glasses-nose-and-mustache disguise lacked a certain aura of professionalism. I tugged the rig off my face. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I fell off a roof and things have been really hard for me lately. I like your liquor store. I think it’s cool that you guys sell stamps. No one sells stamps anymore. And you have a really nice grandson.”
“Thank you,” she said, dropping her hands to her side. “I didn’t really call the nine-one-one. But I guess it is time for us to say goodbye. You can find another place to be yourself.”
Sarah walked me back to Eli’s apartment. My flight was early the next morning. “Text me when you land in Detroit,” she said, “so I know you made it home safe.”
At 6:30 a.m., on the way to SFO Airport, I convinced Eli to shoot past Lon’s office on Mission Street one last time. I’d written a note to slip through his mail slot, to go with the bottle of pee from the evening before, half veiled threat, half last-ditch appeal to his conscience: “WE’RE WATCHING EVERYTHING YOU DO. DO THE RIGHT THING.” But when I got to his office door and poked open the mail slot, I was stunned to see that the pile of mail on the floor was gone. I heard myself say out loud, “What the fuck?” Sometime during the night, apparently, Lon Hackney, stealthy as a ghost, had flitted through, collected two weeks’ worth of contest submissions—or at least the checks from each package—and disappeared again into his bunker. After a week spent staking out his office, I couldn’t believe he’d spirited past me, that I’d missed him by hours. Still, it meant he’d found the bottle I’d left for him, and that thought alone—the eel of spooky unease I was sure now circulated in his belly—kept me smiling the whole way home.
*
Ten months passed. Lon seemed to be lying low. Had my efforts huffed and puffed and blown his house of cards right down? It was hard to say, but all of his lit agency e-mails slipped to a trickle and then fell off completely. Maybe he’d found a new racket, I imagined, and was sticking people with balloon-payment mortgages, or peddling shady investments, or running a three-card monte game on Fisherman’s Wharf—nothing to be proud of, to be certain, but all fine by me. One Saturday in the fall, a guy left his Chevy Silverado parked in front of my house, with Ohio plates and swathed in Ohio State Buckeyes bumper stickers, and I gifted him my remaining bottles of pee in the bed of his truck, with a note that said, “GO BLUE.” I spent the winter in Michigan, trying to regain strength in my ankle, with mixed success, and talking to girls at the bar, trying to forget about Sarah, with no success.
In the spring, out of nowhere, I got an e-mail from Lon—not a personal e-mail, but the standard call for submissions for his latest writing contest, the Noble Pen Awards. The bastard was back, and I saw that after his brief hibernation, he’d snaked his greedy paws to every corner of the country, expanding his empire from six bogus literary agencies to twelve, each scheduled to host an awards gala at a slew of far-flung “Future Is Now” conferences, beginning with New York City and proceeding westward. Among other contests, he’d christened his newly hatched brood the Golden Pencil Awards, the QWERTYUIOP Quest (okay, that one was clever), and, with what was starting to feel more like ill will than inattention to detail, the Cormac McCarthy Memorial Challenge. What the hell? Couldn’t he at least pick writers who’d already died? I forwarded his e-mail to Ondrea Wales, whom I’d continued to trade messages with here and there, and she wrote back four minutes later: “Oh no! He must be stopped. Come to New York—let’s vanquish him!”
Middle of June, I flew to New York, the weekend of the Noble Pen Awards and Lon’s sham “Future Is Now” conference. I claimed to Ondrea that I had other business there, and I guess I sort of did, but mostly I just wanted to meet her in person and dump pee on Lon Hackney’s head. The conference was now spread over two days—an awards ceremony on Thursday night at the swanky Emerald Bell Hotel, and outdoor readings in Tompkins Square Park the following afternoon. Me and Ondrea made a dinner date for Thursday evening, with plans to head over to the Emerald Bell afterwards to confront Lon.
At five o’clock Thursday, I showered and shaved at my cousin’s apartment in Midtown, and transferred a pair of wide-mouth Aquafina bottles t
o my backpack from the gym bag I’d brought from home and checked on the plane. The blue, plastic tint of the bottles gave the pee sloshing inside them a greenish, radioactive glow. In the subway station, on the way to meet Ondrea at a sushi place she’d picked out, a police dog eyed me with grim disapproval, as though it sensed I had a bomb in my bag.
In person, Ondrea was even prettier than her picture. She had long blond hair, green eyes, rosy cheeks, and a wide, easy smile, and she wore a white lace top and a purple beret that seemed fashionable, not pretentious. The fact that she’d applied gloss to her lips and a trace of eyeliner—and were those sparkles dusted across her cheeks?—reassured me that I wasn’t crazy for thinking of this as a date, even though in my e-mails and texts I’d held back from any romantic innuendo and had said only, “Let’s grab a bite,” and, “It’ll be great to hang out.”
What can I say? Ondrea was smart, funny, and inquisitive, entertainingly opinionated, endlessly adorable. For two hours, we tossed back tuna rolls and pounded sake. We talked about writing, our families, our childhoods, our friends, our fears, our hopes, our dreams. I told Ondrea about the old, beautiful, abandoned movie theater with a glorious marquee I’d spotted in the town of Tres Piedras, New Mexico, and how I wanted to move there, fix the place up, and share my favorite movies a couple of nights a week with the locals and whatever road-tripping folks found their way in. Ondrea said she had relatives on her mother’s side who lived in a giant, dilapidated castle in the Slovakian countryside, a hundred miles outside of Bratislava, and had offered to put her up while she worked on her next book. We lapsed into silence, gazing at each other, pondering a home-and-home series: Slovakia, New Mexico.
My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays Page 9