Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  I wrote Bev back and told her to give the girl my e-mail address and phone number. I’d love to help, I told her. I promised myself that if and when this Susan contacted me, I would be polite and helpful to her. What the hell? I had the time and money to be nice now.

  Deke Rivers. Last Resort Press. Paying someone to publish Dead on Arrival. Then I could hire, I thought, an aggressive and insincere publicist to spread the word around, to bookstores and book clubs and the press. Maybe the worst idea of them all wasn’t so bad.

  There must have been hundreds of manuscripts going unread in December and January—editors were too busy e-mailing me. Perhaps I had gotten them in such lousy moods that they wound up rejecting books which they, had they not been bubbling over with bile and nitric acid, would have gladly published otherwise. So be it.

  One evening, two weeks before Christmas, I attended a reading at a Barnes & Noble on Lexington Avenue uptown. The author had penned a variation of Jane Eyre . . . the narrator was the character Bertha Mason, Rochester’s insane wife, and it was written in some incomprehensible patois that was occasionally interrupted with outbursts of schizoid insanity. Having never been able to sit through the movie, having never been able to muster up the interest to read the book, and not paying any attention to the author reading, I had no idea what was going on. The author wasn’t merely doing a reading; it was an attempt at performance art, and at one point she was yelling and hacking apart Jane Eyre’s body with an invisible machete. Saliva flew from her mouth, her eyes surged out of their sockets, and I couldn’t tell if the twenty people attending the reading were riveted to their seats or were too scared to leave.

  Halfway through I stood up and interrupted.

  “I represent,” I told her, “the Brontë estate and we intend to sue!” I brandished my cell phone and said, “I’ve been recording this. How dare you appropriate this magnificent novel for your own personal gain. We just won four hundred thousand dollars from someone who put the umlaut in the Brontë name over the O and not the E. That’s who you’re dealing with here!”

  She froze. Did she really believe I was serious and that the thirty or so grand she had received for penning her high-strung, forgettable work was going to be snatched from her savings account by Charlotte Brontë’s great-great-great-great-grandchildren?

  Someone tapped my shoulder.

  “Mr. Dixon?” I heard a woman whisper behind me.

  I turned around and saw a vaguely familiar face. She examined, for a second or two, at close range the new hair, new pounds, and new tinted shades.

  “Yes?” I whispered back.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to leave please,” the store manager said.

  “All right, but how do you know who I am?”

  She told me that she used to work at the Union Square Barnes & Noble and that I’d once asked why that store had no copies of Plague Boy.

  “I was the one,” she reminded me, “who told you the book was out of print.”

  “Okay, I’m going now,” I told her.

  “And please,” the woman hissed, “stop what you’re doing!”

  They were on to me.

  It was Glenn Tyler of Lakeland & Barker who had called me a Master of the Suburban Mimetic and said that I possessed some sort of secret sharer status. I had, he’d said, given him a kind of spiritual rash. I still have no idea what any of that means, but I do know that he was the Abraham and Sarah of all my rejection; on the genealogical chart of everything negative that had recently befallen me, it all stemmed from him. Therefore he had to pay, too.

  I sent him an e-mail asking if he wanted to read a new book of mine. (This was the first direct contact he and I had ever had.) I didn’t tell him what it was about or the title. A week went by and he told me to send it to him; he was, he told me, familiar with Plague. I sent him DOA and waited. It probably took only one paragraph for him to realize he’d already read it. Graciously never letting on, he e-mailed me: “I am afraid that I’m going to have to pass.” Now, he didn’t know that I had read the rejection he’d sent Clint—I’d been counting on that—so I wrote him back: “That’s really all you have to say about it? Three years, 750 pages, and all you can say is you’re passing? Nothing about me being a master of the suburban mimetic? Nothing about a kind of spiritual rash? Aw, c’mon, throw me some props here, G-Man!” When, as expected, I received no reply, I e-mailed him: “Pussycat got your tongue, does it?”

  That was the end of him and of me and him together, and to my dying day I will picture Glenn Tyler covered head to toe with the scaly, flaming purple rash that I gave him, scratching himself so hard that every ounce of his sick spirit oozes out of the wounds.

  Cynthia noticed that lately I was in an unusually cheerful mood. “You must be having an affair, Chip!” she even once jokingly said. “You’re just so sprightly!” (Even Wifey was now calling me Chip to my face every once in a while, as I was calling her Wifey to hers.) She would come home from work and, after eight hours of battling editors and publishers, I was walking on air to open the door for her.

  “We should take another vacation soon,” she said to me one night in bed.

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” And, man, did I have the money for it.

  We discussed where we might go and, after considering Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Barcelona, Napa and all the other usual places, we settled on London. In February. “It will be freezing and wonderful and we’ll drink tea and keep warm,” she said, sounding like three Hemingway heroines all at once. “And if you want,” she suggested, “you can write during the daytime there while I walk around and shop and keep our hotel room warm and pretty.”

  The next day the two-week vacation my wife and I had begun to plan took a new twist. Or to be more accurate, it got fatally mangled. I was at a private table with APG and told her about it and she said, “So, uh, why does she get to go with you and I don’t?”

  “Because,” I reminded her, “she’s my wife and you’re not?”

  “Not good enough. How about I just happen to be there at the same time as you?”

  Right away I had a much better idea: I would go to London alone. The cover story would be I was refining and finishing the Trilogy. No, I’d tell Wifey, this isn’t really a vacation for me. This is work. I’d tell her that after London—after three weeks in London—she and I would go someplace else, anywhere she wanted. Someplace exotic. The thought of Tahiti, for some reason, drives most women wild. But I didn’t mention Tahiti just yet.

  And in London I really would work on the Trilogy. It was already written; all it needed was a little nip here and a massive tuck there. So yes, I would stay in London for a week and work on it, Artsy would then join me for two; I’d work on the book during the daytime and she and I would dine like royalty at night. We’d shop till we dropped. We’d stay at Claridge’s or the Connaught or some unknown boutique hotel where the room was tiny and the bed was uncomfortable and the cost was five hundred pounds a night.

  I resolved that when I hit $400K I’d stop playing poker. Forever!

  The plan was idiot-proof. I knew that Wifey would allow it: she wanted me to write and to get published again. The week I’d be in London alone, I resolved, I would starve myself into quasi-perfection, so that when Victoria showed up I wouldn’t be such a chubby hulk. I’d eat a half a scone in the morning and walk twenty miles a day, then eat rice for dinner. And APG, I was sure, would fancy the New Much Fiercer Me.

  The next day I woke up realizing that this was all an insane pipe dream and that APG didn’t really mean it, but the first words out of her mouth—or her keyboard—to me that day were: “So have you been thinking of our fantastic London getaway?”

  I confessed I had, then asked her how could she, a mother of two and a wife of one, manage to sneak away for two weeks?

  She told me to hold on. She logged off and I stayed put and sat alone at our private table. Five minutes went by and she didn’t return. Ten minutes. The Big Man sat back in his chair and star
ed into space. Were 2,000 people out there watching me wilt? Fifteen minutes. And then with a merry tinkle she sat right next to me as the Busty Blonde.

  “Just called Mr. APG,” she said. “I told him I wanted to get away & start painting again & really immerse myself in it for a few weeks. He bought it.”

  We played a hand and I quickly dumped $700 to her. “Hey!” I said. “That was my round trip airfare!”

  “Just e-mail me,” she said, “when you’re going and I’ll make it work out.”

  We played one more hand. I don’t know if she lost on purpose but I won the airfare back with the next hand.

  That moment when I opened the door and saw the back of Diane Warren’s head between my younger brother’s legs . . . that was without question the Hindenburg “Oh, the humanity” low point of my life. Nothing will ever top that. Were I ever to walk in on Wifey naked in bed with the starting front seven of the Dallas Cowboys, that wouldn’t do it. Because I’ve already had the shock of a lifetime. Dostoyevsky was once taken outside to be shot by a firing squad but lo and behold, he wasn’t executed—it was just your typical cute Russian prank (Gotcha, tovarich!). As a result of this extreme close-up of the existential abyss, hundreds of thousands of people were later forced to read The Brothers Karamazov against their will.

  Maybe we all get the personal lowlights we deserve.

  So as a cheating victim I wanted to know just what I was getting into. I knew everything there was to know about Victoria G. Landreth, but how much of the everything that she told me was true . . . and what else was there? But what I really wanted to know was: was I the only player on the site she was flirting with?

  There was only one way to find out.

  One day I told APG I had to bring both of my computers in to be fixed. She told me she would miss me and I told her I’d miss her too.

  It was all a ruse.

  I opened up a new account on the Galaxy and chose a name for my new persona. The handle I had in mind would certainly be available: the Suburban Mimetic.

  For three days I spied on Artsy Painter Gal. Since the Suburban Mimetic wasn’t on her Galaxy “buddy list,” she would have no idea I was logged on. I watched her sashay from table to table, I watched her play dozens of hands, I felt it in the pit of my stomach when other male players attempted to flirt with her. She talked to them but never flirted and it warmed my heart. My e-honey was being true to me! Over those three days I even sat in and played a few hands with her—I purposely lost half the London airfare she’d lost to me—and struck up a potentially dangerous conversation. “So, Artsy Painter Gal, what do you look like?” the Suburban Mimetic brazenly asked her. “Eh, I’m all right,” was all she said. She refused to play the coquette and I gulped—it was like the mushy point in the movie when the loser guy realizes that the pretty girl really likes him best after all.

  (The Suburban Mimetic also played a few hands with History Babe, got her at a private table, and exchanged ten minutes of dirty talk with her. She told me, “Oh god oh god i am cumming now!” but I knew—in Vegas she had told me too much about her m.o.—that she wasn’t in fact “cumming” but probably was slapping together a baloney and cheddar sandwich with her free hand.)

  Three days later Chip Zero was back. Artsy told me she’d missed me and that she’d been miserable without me. My duplicity had paid off.

  (If poker has given me anything, other than esteem, self-confidence and a lot of money, it is a knowledge of bluffing and about how anybody will believe almost anything.)

  Everything I was doing emboldened me to do more. Winning money at poker was my safety net and gave me the courage to flirt and possibly abscond for three weeks to London with APG. That in turn gave me the courage to take on the publishing world, which gave me the courage to win more money at poker. My onions, reader, were now the size of cannonballs.

  And it was with those dangling cannonballs that I phoned an old acquaintance.

  Martin Tilford: Frank Dixon? Good God! A blast from the past!

  Me: Martin, how are you?

  Martin Tilford: I’m good. You know, I have warm memories of meeting you back—

  Me: Do they involve seared peppercorn tuna?

  Martin Tilford: Heh-heh. You remember that. By the way, I should tell you—I read Plague Boy and enjoyed it immensely.

  Me: What about the other book ?

  Martin Tilford: The Horror of Love? No, but it is on my list. Why are—

  Me: Hey, Martin, things were very bad. Remember?

  Martin Tilford: Things were bad? I’m sorry but I must be missing something here.

  Me: Things were very bad then but still we carried on. [Long silence.] You’re not getting this, are you? Things were very bad. But still we carried on. We carried on.

  Martin Tilford: I don’t know what you’re implying. Uh, why are you calling, Frank?

  Me: Things were very bad then but still we carried on. That was the first line of my book. Remember now? You liked the first line. You liked it a lot. And I was just wondering if maybe you’d want to publish it since, you know, it got off to such a great start. And if not, then maybe you’d like to take me out and this time I’d be allowed to order the burger that I wanted? Well? Martin?

  He groaned, he sighed, he waited for me to continue; I didn’t and he hung up on me.

  (To really rub it in, for the next four business days I called the still-extant Café Quelquechose and had seared peppercorn tuna delivered to him. I stopped when I realized that I might not be torturing him with this and that he was probably eating it.)

  A few days before Christmas I e-mailed Greg Nolan, my editor at Norwich Cairn Books, my U.K. publisher, whom I’d met several times. When I told him I’d be in London in February and had a new book I was shopping around, he suggested we do lunch and asked me why Clint had not sent him the manuscript; when I e-mailed him back telling him I was going it alone now, he told me that he felt he couldn’t read the book unless Clint sent it to him; when I e-mailed him back saying that while this was fair to Clint it wasn’t fair to me, the book’s author, he told me to contact Clint’s foreign sales representatives in London—maybe if they read the book and liked it, he would read it—and I remembered then that even though my books had gotten good reviews in England, they had not sold terribly well there either; when I e-mailed him saying, “Okay, does this mean we won’t do lunch?” he told me, “Of course we will!” He told me he would try to set up a reading at some local venue. For some unknowable reason I told him to go ahead and set it up.

  Greg Nolan had taken a page out of Ross Carpenter’s book. No, it wasn’t Ross’s book—it was Franz Kafka’s. I soon found out that the people who handled foreign sales for the Reno Brothers would not read Dead on Arrival either, not unless Clint submitted it to them. The prospect that I would become the first American author to win the Booker Prize (and that this in turn would get the book published in the U.S. and that all the publishers who rejected me would be humiliated) was starting to look quite bleak, and no longer was the irony of my book’s title merely dawning upon me; now it was a rusty spike getting driven into my skull.

  If Glenn Tyler was my Abraham and Sarah, then Clint Reno was my Adam and Eve.

  It was his turn to pay now.

  I created a purposely sloppy letterhead for a scruffy unbathed hipster named Joseph Kaye and made up a fictitious address for him in the once edgy Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I faxed a letter to the Reno Brothers and told Clint that I (Joey) was a twenty-five-year-old Yale grad who’d just undergone a rigorous five-week ordeal at the Babbo Writers Workshop and emerged one of the cream of the crop. I told him that my short stories had been printed in many alternative publications and on literary Web sites . . . and then I proceeded to make them all up: Swordshares, iLit, FUNKtional Illiterate Press, subfuscus.com, the Anti-Antioch Review, whipster.org, alternationation.com, literalorgasm.net, and so on. Would you, I queried, like to take a look at the 310-page work of fiction I’d just finished, which was “dickens me
ets pynchon meets 50 cent”? Fearing he might try to contact Joey K., I told him to ignore the letterhead information: I no longer lived in “Billyburg” but now lived in (the much more edgy) Greenpoint and would contact him.

  I called the office a few days later and it was so easy to get through to him that it broke my heart. Courtney Bellkamp simply put hipster Joey on hold and then ten seconds later, Clint Reno picked up. Not so long ago, it had been that easy for me, too.

  Putting on my best garbled Eddie Vedder voice, I (Joseph Kaye) told Clint what my new book was about (“sexually-racially-artistically confused hip-hop fuck-up torn between white boy ivy-league shit and hard-core rap underbelly, and it’s sort of man’s inhumanity to himself?”) and how I’d won this and that minor literary prize (“and the total amount,” I said, “of all the prizes came to about forty-five dollars?”), and Clint was very polite and interested. “Sure,” he said, “e-mail it to me.” He then asked me if I had been in touch with any other agents and I—truthfully—told him that I had not, that he was my first choice. “I was looking for an agent,” I mumbled in all lower-case Vedderese, “And I read that you represent Frank W. Dixon, whose work I like really admire?”

  “Yes, yes . . . I do.”

  Rat bastard sack of steaming, two-week-old, maggot-infested cowshit.

  “And the weirdest thing . . .” Joey K. said, “is I think I saw you a few weeks ago on Spring Street talking to him?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I did run into Frank.”

  “He had doughnuts? And he dropped the box?”

  “Yep, that was him.”

  “Okay, I’ll e-mail the novel soon. . . . I just need to kinda like punctuate and uppercase it and whatnot.”