by Ted Heller
I was in the middle of writing a brief e-mail to Barbara Bennett at Egregious Motion Pictures when—puff!—I received a brief e-mail from Barbara Bennett at Egregious Motion Pictures.
I am so sorry to be the one to tell you this but Egregious isn’t going to renew the Plague Boy option. Pacer Burton was really excited about the project but he’s had a ton of other offers and after carefully considering his choices, he decided not to do Plague Boy.
I’m very sorry. I know this meant a lot to you. Please don’t slay the messenger!
Hey, you can always have Vance and Clint shop Plague around again. I’m sure they’d do a great job.
I couldn’t wring from my crushed, deflated soul the graciousness to send Barbara a heartfelt thank-you for all the work she’d done for me, which was a considerable amount. I couldn’t even muster up enough energy to close the e-mail, so I just sat there staring at it for thirty minutes. I didn’t sob, I didn’t wail, I didn’t whimper . . . because those are all things that dead people cannot do.
Plague Boy: The Movie would never be made, so there would be no reissue of the book with Tom, Leo, Scarlett, Reese on the cover with the words “Now a Major Motion Picture” beneath the title, and there would be no reissue of Love: A Horror Story with the words “Written by the author of Plague Boy, now a Major Motion Picture” on the cover. It was over for me. The lights were all but out, and the curtains were coming down before Act I was even done.
It couldn’t have been easy for Barbara to send me that dreadful bit of news, but she needn’t have because the news came to me automatically, via Nexis, a few hours later:
LexisNexis Search Result
Copyright Variety Magazine
Pacer Burton, whose Pacer Burton’s Breakthrough bows the day before Thanksgiving, has signed on to helm Saucier: A Bitch in the Kitchen, based on the best-selling memoir by Jill Conway. (The Plague Boy, which he had been planning to lens, has been placed on the shelfola “indefinitely.”) The book, which follows in gritty but hilarious detail three years in the life of a sexy, sassy New York chef, is an Oprah Book Club pick and has been on the best-sellers list for 15 weeks. Reese Witherspoon and Leonardo DiCaprio have agreed . . .
I didn’t tell Wifey the movie was dead in the water. There was no reason for her to know. If she asked about it in a few months, I figured, I’d just tell her that they were still working out the details and that the movie would get made. The wheels were still in motion . . . it just took time. She would believe it. Because for a long time I had believed it too.
The day before Thanksgiving I went over $250,000.
I had finally found something I could excel at, something I was better at than 99 percent of the rest of the population. I couldn’t paint or play basketball. Hedge funds, stocks and bonds and their ilk, were beyond my limited scope. I couldn’t write or create iPad apps or be a short-order cook. But I could win an awful lot of money from a lot of people I never saw.
I would have thrown every cent of my stack into the garbage just to get published again.
I had Thanksgiving dinner with Cynthia; her father, who had recently been named by New York magazine as one of the city’s top fifty divorce lawyers; and his surgically reupholstered second wife on the Upper East Side. I left before dessert, claiming I wasn’t feeling too well due to overeating (I swiped some pecan pie on the way out and scarfed it down in the elevator). I just wanted to go home, log on, and play. It was almost seven at night when I left and the weather was windy and drizzly and hardly anyone was on the street. New York City usually seems bleak and empty on Thanksgiving night and that evening it was no different.
PBS once ran an excellent documentary series about Jesus Christ and the early days of Christianity. It follows the path of what we know and believe of the Historical Jesus and His journey in becoming the Savior, the Son of God. One episode ends with the portentous words: “Jesus of Nazareth had become . . . Jesus Christ.”
As I walked down Lexington Avenue that night, my hands in my coat pockets, I paid attention to little around me. At a street corner I heard someone say something, call something out. It was a word, one crisp syllable, and there was something familiar and friendly about it. But I didn’t pay it any mind and kept walking, stooping over to brace myself from the rain and wind. A half a block later I heard it again but still it didn’t fully register.
Five minutes later it was raining harder and windier and it dawned upon me that someone—whoever it was—had been saying my name. They’d called out, “Frank!”
But that wasn’t me anymore. Just as Muhammad Ali regarded Cassius Clay as his slave name, “Frank W. Dixon” was now a thing of the past. That person was a relic, an MIA, a cipher. A thing from three thousand years ago who never mattered. Imagine a butterfly sprouting from a chrysalis and then kicking it out of sight. That was me. It was a skin I’d been shedding for almost a year, a tattered and soiled parachute I had buried two miles deep in the ground after falling to Earth. It was my slave name and I didn’t want to answer to it anymore. I wanted to change my name on all my billing addresses, on my apartment lease, and on my books, my bank and credit card accounts.
That other person didn’t exist anymore. He was gone.
I stopped on the empty street and looked into the window of a closed shop. I had put on about forty pounds; I had on round, rose-pink-tinted glasses, and my hair was short, champagne blond, and deadly.
I was the Big Man.
I had become Chip Zero.
PART III
Busted
13
Holy War
It’s not in Poor Richard’s Almanack but it’s a fact of life: the longer you live, the more people you meet, and the more people you meet, the more people you’ll know who will die. Perhaps Marcel Proust, holed up in his cork-lined bedroom and never seeing the light of day on Boulevard Malesherbes, knew what he was doing.
One winter morning I logged on to the Galaxy and went to a table in Medium. I played three hands there, then Wolverine Mommy joined me. She didn’t say hello, she just said: “Did you hear? OMG! It’s terrible. Chip, Grouchy Old Man died!”
Since I sometimes had trouble believing that these people really lived, it was inconceivable to me that they could also really die. (Imagine reading Homer Simpson’s obituary in the Times.) There was a man who was born, who lived, who got married and had kids and called himself Grouchy Old Man; I saw him online at this or that table, he won money, he lost money. And he had, Wolverine Mommy told me, just died of a stroke.
He actually had died the week before, but it had taken a few days for the news to filter through to the tens of thousands of souls inhabiting the Galaxy. Grouch and Cali Wondergal had become friends and occasionally spoke to each other on the phone; when Cali hadn’t heard from him for a few days, she made a few calls, did some snooping around, and found out that he had dropped dead on a line at a deli. His addled, Alzheimer’s-suffering wife would never realize that she had outlived the man she’d betrayed many times on his desk at work and in his own bed.
Had Cali not poked around and found out the news, would I ever have realized what had happened? Perhaps after a week of not seeing Grouch, I would have thought he’d gone away for a week. Two weeks more, I would’ve thought he was on a senior-citizen cruise, playing shuffleboard and comparing meds with the other altacockers. But after three or more weeks I probably would have assumed he’d had his fill of poker and found something more constructive to do—such as taking up watercolors, knitting, or tap-dancing—with the waning years of his life.
Sucking up my pride, I bought a Writer’s Market one afternoon and commenced my jihad.
I combed through the Bible of Failed Writers Everywhere and got the names, addresses, and e-mail addresses of every editor I thought might be mildly receptive to Dead on Arrival. Some publishers, the book informed me, wouldn’t respond to e-mail or faxes—you had to send snail mail and then assume a waiting posture. Some wanted a ten-page excerpt, others just a plot summary, s
ome couldn’t be bothered at all even if you were George Eliot come back to life and had just penned Middlemarch, Part II.
For those wary publishing souls who accepted queries but no excerpts by e-mail, I composed the following:
My name is Frank W. Dixon and I’ve had two books published, Plague Boy and Love: A Horror Story. The former has been described as coruscating and blistering.
After much internal struggling it pains me to inform you I’ve parted ways with my long-time agent Clint Reno and have decided to go it alone.
My new book is called Dead on Arrival. It is about a suburban dad whose life is changed irrevocably one day when his wife and children perish unexpectedly. Within two days he is having the time of his life.
If you would like to read an excerpt of this work of sublime suburban mimesis, please let me know.
I sent that to eighteen editors. I then tweaked it for the more trusting types who would accept a twenty-page excerpt, tweaked it again for the not so trusting who only accepted ten-page excerpts. Taking snail mail, faxing, and e-mailing into account, I had to come up with eight different templates, eight variations on the same desperate theme, which was: PLEASE READ IT, PLEASE LIKE IT, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PUBLISH IT! By the second day I had sent out fifty-eight queries, including seventeen twenty-page excerpts and fifteen ten-page excerpts.
Though it didn’t take up nearly as much time, all of this was more difficult than writing the book had been.
Now I could go back to playing poker and checking my e-mail for the avalanche of replies from editors. But what do I do, I fretted, if ten publishers want to publish Dead on Arrival? How do I handle that? I decided that I would simply call Ross F. Carpenter and say, “Ross, you’re hired. Pick the highest bidder and do the deal. And, oh yeah, you no longer have to read the book.”
I got replies on the first day, some within minutes: six editors politely passed, three impolitely passed (“I have no interest in such dreadful material”), four requested excerpts and three of those who had received excerpts subsequently requested the whole thing. Over the next few days, it got even more difficult to keep track of: some editors who had read the ten pages wanted twenty more, some who had read the twenty pages wanted only ten more, and, of course, there were some who had read ten or twenty who were telling me to fuck off.
But I wouldn’t let them have the last word. I was the Big Man now. Watch out!
One editor who didn’t want to read an excerpt—I don’t think she even finished reading my e-mail query—told me, “I haven’t read either of your two books (certainly not after I read Cody Marshall’s review of Plague Boy in the Times) and, based on your summary and sales history, am certainly not going to read this one.”
Well, the new tougher me couldn’t let it just die like that. I e-mailed her back.
I would really love to know what in the name of Almighty God does that (you not having read my first two books) have anything whatsoever to do with this (you not giving my third book a freaking chance)? This means you would’ve passed up on Gatsby ’cause you never read This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. Now, I’ve Googled you, and your client list is unimpressive at best. I mean, I’ve never heard of any of them! So as of this writing, you are just as much a failure as I am. The difference between us, you ask? I may be a failure but as for you, you have to leech off of people like me!
To the editors who refused to read an excerpt, I e-mailed: “You’re not going to even give it a chance?!” Sometimes that would get a reply, sometimes not. I knew they had stacks of manuscripts to tend to . . . but I wanted these refuseniks to spend more time reading my e-mail than they did that other stuff. “I am a published author of two slightly well-received books and you won’t even read TEN pages of my new work? And you wonder why people watch America’s Next Top Model while there are only three people who read fiction anymore?”
I was, I knew, burning bridges for any books I might write in the future, but I was cognizant of the fact that I might not write anything in the future now that I was making more from poker than from literature and that these bridges had never been built in the first place.
One editor e-mailed me:
This is the most depressing and disturbing thing I’ve seen in quite some time. I could not read more than five pages of what you sent me.
I was aghast and wrote back:
Aren’t literature, music, and art supposed to disturb? You think Elizabethan audiences were in stitches when King Lear died, you think Caravaggio’s Deposition is a laff-a-minute riot, don’t you know that when people first saw Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring they threw ratatouille at the orchestra and when they first saw Un Chien Andalou there was a riot and for a while slitting eyeballs became de rigueur?! Oh, why am I even wasting my time with you?! Just keep publishing your drivel, why don’t you.
The very worst angel of my nature now wanted Dead on Arrival to never get published, just so I could keep firing off my rage-infused hate mail. It was the best damn catharsis a fella could have that didn’t involve expelling some sort of fluid or waste product. God forbid some editor would actually like my book and want to publish it!
To the editor who told me: “Women do the majority of fiction reading these days and this is a novel that would be and should be despised by women,” I wrote back: “So you’re just going to pander to the shopaholics and Devil Wears Pradas and Bergdorf blondes of this world? Excuse me but doesn’t that make you a whore?” I didn’t expect a reply to that but five minutes later came: “I’m not going to even dignify that with a response, Frank,” to which I responded: “Um, you just did. Besides, my mother, who is a woman, would love to read this book and not just because she’s my mother.” One minute later I received: “Based on your writing abilities, Frank, I’m surprised your mother can read at all.” To which I replied: “My mother, I’ll have you know, has been a literacy volunteer since before the library in ancient Alexandria burned down so I request that you refrain from mentioning her. And how low have you sunk anyway that you would bring up my mother in this discussion? But I’m not surprised you took it into the gutter for that is where you truly belong.”
A few editors, based on my summary or the excerpts they’d read, did want to read the whole shebang but eventually they turned me down. (Only now was the cruel irony of a book titled Dead on Arrival dawning on me.) Even though they had given me a chance, I let them have it, too. “Well,” I wrote them, “I want to sincerely thank you for taking out the time from what I’m certain must be a busy day to make an incredibly moronic mistake.”
Some editors, I sensed, wanted to keep the chain of hate going. For all I know, it was the high point of their workday. These editors I sort of respected—they were feisty—and there was one scrappy guy in his sixties who traded a total of thirty-one e-mails with me. (I’d like to believe that they admired my pugnacity, too.) However these exchanges eventually degenerated into schoolyard “are too” “am not” “are too” “nyah, nyah, nyah” affairs.
“Your book isn’t nearly as good as you think it is,” one editor wrote me. I replied: “You’re right. It’s not. It’s better! So publish it.” She wrote back: “Nope. It’s just not good, Frank.” To which I riposted: “You’re right. It’s just not good! It’s great! So publish it.”
“I’m sorry,” another editor wrote me, “but we’re going to have to pass on this. With the way this business is right now, it’s just not what we’re looking for.”
I asked him: “Huh? ‘The way this business is right now’? Can you please tell me about ‘the way this business is right now’? Because frankly I am not familiar with ‘the way this business is right now.’ ” When he didn’t reply I asked him again. And again. Then I fired off an e-mail so offensive that I feared hearing from the police.
I was getting badly battered, I was losing the war, but at least now I was fighting back. And I was comforted knowing that I wasn’t merely fighting for me, but I was fighting for every working stiff who
ever got bawled out by a boss, I was fighting for every Little Guy who got stomped on by a Big Bully, I was standing up for the poor loser who knows he can’t fight City Hall and for homeless puppies who get euthanized for having sad loveable eyes and floppy ears. I was Tom Joad fighting so that hungry people could eat, and for poor kids laughing when supper’s ready. But mostly, yeah, I was fighting for me.
Feeling terrible had never felt so good.
An extra dose of insult and injury came my way one day from a likely source: Bev Martin. She told me she had just finished her third novel, which I didn’t care about, and that her publisher was going to give it a massive push in the spring, which really annoyed me, and that movie companies were already clamoring for it, which infuriated me. But this wasn’t, she pointed out, why she was e-mailing me now.
soooo . . . what i really need is a favor. i met a criminally young and sort of sweetly naïve girl at a writer’s conference last week. her name’s Susan Jessup and she’s only a few weeks out of the Babbo Writers Workshop in Ashland, NC, and lo and behold—she’s written her first novel. it’s dark but goodish and she said that YOU are her favorite author! when i told her i knew you she was ecstatic. anyway, could you/would you/can you please look at her ms. and get in touch with her? she’s a doll, really, and merely seeks your sage wisdom.
also, don’t forget: Deke Rivers, Last Resort.
Bev
I couldn’t believe that her third book would be getting a massive push and that another one of her bathetic tales about a warped wealthy family would get sold to the movies; I couldn’t believe that she had the nerve to ask me to get in contact with this young, criminally sweet Babbo writer after she’d initiated the whole Saucier debacle; I couldn’t believe she had the audacity to again bring up Deke Rivers (didn’t she know how insulting that was to me?). But what I really could not believe was that someone had read two books of mine and liked them both and thought that I had some wisdom to impart. That just didn’t seem right.