by Lolita Files
“Y’all fucking with me, right?”
“No,” said Penn. “That’s really the name.”
Fiyah’s face was blank. He leaned forward, his expression unchanged. Then he sat back, shaking his head.
“Now that’s some brilliant shit,” he said with a laugh.
“That’s my editor,” Penn said. “She’s a marketing machine.”
Fiyah looked at Beryl.
“I admire people with hustle,” he said.
Beryl smiled, basking in his approval.
Fiyah leaned back in his chair.
“You know I heard it’s a whole big secrecy thing surrounding it. Like some spy shit. No reviews, no samples. I like that. How’d you come up with that idea?”
Beryl jumped in before Penn could speak.
“Actually, we’re revealing a little info, but not much. People will know it’s an update of—”
“Yeah, yeah, Kafka,” On Fiyah said. “I know. The Metamorphosis. With the big-ass cockroach. That shit was crazy.”
“I’ve always liked Kafka’s work,” Penn said. “I started out just having fun with it, and it kind of turned into something real.”
“That means you hit the zone.”
“The zone?”
“Yeah, the zone. When you’re writing, or making music, or producing, or creating, at some point you start hitting everything just right. That’s the zone, man. That’s the best place in the world an artist can be.”
“Hopefully I’ll do it again,” Penn said. “This was just my first book.”
“Yeah, but you’ll write more,” said Fiyah.
He was connecting with Penn. Beryl was very pleased.
“I like this,” Fiyah said, turning to Beryl. “I like how y’all are thinking. Nobody’s ever come to me before about doing something on a level like this. I like the creativity behind it. You gotta play that shit up. Ride that wave, ’cause let me tell you, waves crash, and you gotta make sure you don’t crash with them. You gotta always be thinking, be thinking”—he tapped his temple—“ready for the next wave. Diversifying. Going to the next level.”
“Right,” Penn said.
“I read an article a few years ago…funny, I can’t remember where I saw it. Some magazine. Mighta been The New Yorker.”
Fiyah’s face performed the above-the-neck equivalent of an abdominal crunch, a sort of spasm/shudder/blink where his eyes rolled upward and off to the side as he lapsed into fiery concentration, as though the heat of his thought would pressure his gray matter into spitting forth requested data. It was over in a nanoinstant.
“I can’t remember,” he said. “Anyway, it was about the zeitgeist and reinvention. It offered this theory that I think makes a whole lotta sense. It said all the celebrities who’ve had longevity reinvented themselves every three years. Three years.” On Fiyah held up three fingers. “It’s a cycle. It takes about that long for your popularity to rise, crest, and ebb, and the ones who ain’t got no Plan B die out, but the ones who keep flippin’ it, flippin’ it, see, they keep going. Every three years you gotta flip it. Remember that. Madonna perfected that shit. She showed the world how to work the three-year flip. She did everything from simulating sex on stage to dancing around a black Jesus in flames and shit on a cross. Now she’s the bestselling author of children’s books. That girl is a damn zeitgeist zen master. Tell me she ain’t.”
Penn and Beryl both nodded.
“See, you got that thing, and it overlaps a whole lotta genres. Ain’t too many people got that, and on top of that, ain’t too many of the ones who got it know how to keep it. That’s why it’s not good enough for people like us to just have a Plan B. We gotta have a Plan Alphabet, and I’m not just talking about the regular Latin alphabet.”
Penn had been astounded to learn that On Fiyah was this deep. The regular Latin alphabet? Who, outside of English teachers, linguistics experts, and extraordinary nerds remembered what the standard alphabet of the English language was called?
“See, that’s not good enough,” Fiyah was saying. “When we get to Z, see, that’s when we go Greek, and kick it with Plan Alpha, and work our way all the way to Plan Omega. Gotta keep it movin’, baby.”
Penn and Beryl stared at him, dumbstruck.
“So let’s do this,” he said. “Let’s maximize and multiplex. Let’s make some hit records.”
“Oh, Mr. Fiyah, thank you!” Beryl squealed.
“Yeah, Mr. Fiyah,” Penn added. “I almost don’t know what to say.”
“That’s all right, kid. Save your breath for the record. We’re about to make you a star. You could be my new buddy. My cool white boy. Every brother needs one cool white boy in their camp.”
The Calvin Klein national print campaign was the first to roll out. It included an enormous black-and-white billboard of Penn in Times Square. He was naked, his body absolute sculpted perfection, his book placed strategically in front of his larger-than-life business.
In the lower corner of the ad was the logo for Tower Records. In the lower right corner was an iPod and the Apple logo. Their placement in the ad didn’t seem to make much sense, but they were there nonetheless. The words “Calvin Klein” were in giant print above Penn’s head. The ad was traffic-stopping. It was as though Times Square had its very own god.
“What’s this word? I’m not familiar with it.”
They were at Beryl’s office, deep into a line edit of Book. She’d been in there with him for the past three hours and had Shecky holding all her calls. Even though she worked with Penn during off hours, she wanted to make a good show at the office as well.
He leaned over her shoulder. She angled the page so he could look.
“Oh that,” he said, sitting back. “It means ‘goat sucker.’ It’s a creature that’s been blamed for the deaths of thousands of goats in Mexico and Puerto Rico that have been found with puncture wounds in their necks. But no one’s ever seen one. Kind of like how no one knows who’s making crop circles. It’s considered an ABE.”
“What’s that?”
“An anomalous biological entity. That’s what UFO experts call creatures for which there are no scientific explanations.”
“I see,” Beryl said, her brow crinkled. She was beginning to wonder if Penn was an ABE. Everything about him was so very…different. She loved him for those differences, but in cases like this, they got in the way.
“What does it have to do with the story?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t understand.”
He shrugged.
“There’s nothing to understand. I just always wanted an excuse to use the word chupacabra. I was writing a book, so there it is.”
Her brow was an accordion.
“Right.” She paused. “I think we should lose it. It’s silly and distracting. I had a hard enough time trying to learn how to pronounce ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ and say it right at all those pitch meetings. Just because you’ve got a big brain and know a lot of weird stuff, there’s no need to show it off without cause. It’ll annoy the readers.”
“No,” he said. “The chupacabra stays.”
“Surely you’re not serious. This is your career.”
He stood and walked over to the vast window overlooking the city, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Penn.”
He glanced up Sixth Avenue. The street was a tight bustle of moving flesh and metal. And pigeons. Always the pigeons. A group of them caught his eye as they flapped themselves airborne from the top of a shorter building across the way. Such disgusting creatures. Flying parasites that served no purpose. He could never understand why things existed in the world that didn’t serve a purpose.
“Penn, really,” Beryl pressed. “This word is just stuck in the middle of the text and it’s not relevant to anything. We’re positioning you to be a serious author. The last thing we want to happen when people read your work is for them to be able to dismiss you as another dumb blonde model throwing words around without any respec
t for the craft. We have to do this right. You’re going to change the paradigm for beautiful blondes everywhere.”
Penn watched an enormous pigeon on a ledge, the epitome of feathered nastiness, a Jabba the Hutt among his peers. The bird was so big, all it could do was squawk and coo, but not much else. It had attempted flight a couple of times and apparently said fuck it. There was too much girth to become easily airborne. The bird probably only flew under extreme, necessary conditions. Another pigeon dropped some bread in front of the stuffed bird and flew off. His bitch, Penn assumed. The fat fuck sat back, letting the chick do all the work. Penn felt bile gathering in his mouth, he was so offended by the useless creature.
“Take it out,” Beryl was saying. “People will know how smart you are. I’ll make sure of that. You won’t have to announce it like this.”
He tore his gaze away from the lonesome ghetto dove and looked at her, letting the command she’d just made hang in the air. Her expression was firm. This was not the face of his adoring lover. This was the intense gaze of an editor on a mission.
“Fine,” he said. “Get rid of it.”
He was writing in his journal with great fervor, now that things had begun to accelerate.
My life is finally on track. Beryl has taken this whole thing on and she’s gone ballistic with it. She’s the perfect fit for this. If only we were able to do it without the sex. I guess I should be grateful she doesn’t need it that much, although all the damn cuddling she wants to do is killing me. It would be so good to have her in my corner just as my friend. She really is a good editor and an awesome marketer. I see why she’s up there with the best.
The musings were almost childlike in their simplicity of tone. Sometimes they went on for pages. Other times, he expressed himself in clean, simple, abbreviated strokes.
Calvin Klein!
Or…
I’m holding a check for six hundred and fifty-one thousand six hundred and sixty-six dollars. The last three digits are six-six-six. I suppose there’s some humor inherent in that.
His favorite notation of all was the height of perfect brevity.
Sharlyn Tate has the best pussy I’ve ever had.
When he wasn’t journaling, scheming with Beryl, savoring Shar, or spending his new stream of money, he was angling over other concerns. They weren’t as heavy, but they mattered nonetheless.
Next on his agenda: hooking up his boy Mercury so he could cash in. He already had a plan for it. Beryl was taking out some kind of a loan. She’d already been approved. She wanted to rehab her place. Penn was going to convince her that Mercury and his uncle were just the team to do it.
Sharlyn’s creativity
…was back. She was satisfied and sunny, full of a lust for life, fueled by a lust for love. She was done with The Magic Man by the time Miles returned, which was two weeks after the first time she and Penn did the do. Beryl couldn’t believe how quickly Sharlyn had gone from having nothing for almost a year, to suddenly producing a manuscript.
“How’d you…I don’t understand…I’m delighted, but where did the—”
“It just popped out of me,” Shar said with a grin.
It was late October, plenty of time to push the book through the production schedule for a summer release. The art director was already hard at work trying to create a cover that would match its highly erotic nature.
“It’s very Anaïs Nin,” Beryl said. “It’s good, but very different for you. My hands got sweaty just reading it.”
You should have seen me writing it, Shar thought.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you had yourself a Henry Miller somewhere, stoking you full of ideas. Miles must be back.”
“Are you saying it’s cheesy? Is there too much sex?”
“No,” Beryl said. “The amount of sex is fine. It feels organic, not forced, which is what makes it work. Nin’s writing was filled with very intellectual, literary eroticism. This reminds me of Spy in the House of Love. There was poetry in her prose, an elegance in the midst of all the sex. It was beautiful. That’s what this is like. Dangerous, edgy, poignant, but it’s all you. I think it’s your best work yet. If this is why it took you so long, then I must say, it was worth the wait.”
Shar was pleased. She thought this was her best work, too. The devil was in those pages. The dark side of her had been freed. Good and bad had melded together into what she felt was a perfect symmetry of artistic expression.
The sales force at Kittell Press had rushed forth to create an advance stir.
In the spirit of the bold, provocative prose of the giants of erotic literature, Sharlyn Tate, the Queen of Pop Fiction, has crafted a searing tale of sex, love, and power among the ruins of the Manhattan demimonde. Fans of Tate will love The Magic Man, and she’s sure to win even more loyal readers with every turn of the page.
Barnes and Noble, Borders, and others responded by pre-ordering in bigger numbers than ever. Cosmopolitan bought the first serial rights. The Today Show had her scheduled to appear on May 23, one week before Memorial Day, to help launch The Magic Man as the read of the summer.
Meanwhile, Shar had become Rumpelstiltskin, churning away at her laptop, turning words into gold. She was already at work on her next manuscript, oozing with inspiration. The more she was with Penn, the more she wrote. Pages were flying out of her faster than she could keep up with.
She had read Penn’s book, which she thought was remarkable, like nothing she’d ever seen. She wanted to be a part of helping him break out as a writer. She knew Harvey quite well, she told him. He’d turned four of her books into movies, all of which were commercial successes. If Penn didn’t mind, she wanted to send a copy of Book over to him. It would make a great film, and this story was just the kind of thing big Harvey was good at.
She even tried to convince Beryl to release Penn’s book around the same time as hers.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Beryl said. “I don’t want to do anything to take the attention off either of you. His book is going to be a big deal. You always get a lot of attention. TMM’s going gangbusters.” Beryl often abbreviated the names of books with more than one word in the title. TMM was her shortened version of Shar’s new book. “You both deserve to have the limelight on your own,” she said. “We’re going to publish his book in September. It’ll give us time to get everything rolled out the way we want.”
“But don’t you think it would be great publicity, the two of us doing some TV and radio together and maybe a few signings? It’d be a good way to help build his momentum.”
Sharlyn watched Beryl as she sat behind her desk. That nervous knee of hers was shaking, she could tell. Beryl was trying to come up with a solid reason for why it wouldn’t work. She could be so close at times. What did Beryl think she was going to do, try to steal her thunder and take credit for Penn?
“I don’t know. I’m afraid you might cannibalize each other’s sales.”
“How? My audience is my audience. They’re going to buy my books no matter what, as long as I keep trying to tell a good story. My sales are consistent and my fans always wait—enthusiastically, I might add—for the next project from me.”
Beryl was frowning.
“But it won’t be fair to Penn. Don’t you think? It won’t give him a chance to build an independent identity if he’s automatically linked to you.”
“Automatically linked to me?”
“That came out wrong. What I mean is, our plan is to roll out his book by building a distinct, well-crafted image for him. Advertising and publicity are working hard toward that end. It’s a delicate balance. The public is so unpredictable.”
“But aren’t you going to have all that other stuff? The Calvin Klein ads and Tower Records and, what, iPods? Shit, I’d like a signature iPod. Apple could make one inspired by me, with cheetah print, or maybe leopard, and they could put diamonds around the edges of it.” She leaned forward, excited at the prospect. “I know…there could be a limited-ed
ition Sharlyn Tate iPod, customized by Jacob the Jeweler. I could have a billboard. How come you’re not doing that kind of stuff for me?”
“How do you know about the iPods and Calvin Klein?” Beryl asked, blinking rapidly.
Sharlyn’s insides felt wiggly as she thought of the moment in bed when Penn had told her what was being planned for him.
“C’mon, Beryl. Word gets out. What’s the big secret anyway? This is me. We’re friends.”
Beryl was up, pacing the room. Sharlyn watched her fidgeting around. Beryl really needed to relax more, she thought. She was such a flutterbudget.
“So how come I don’t have any iPod deals? How come I’m not in a Calvin Klein campaign?”
Beryl turned toward her, a tiny crinkle of exasperation in her brow.
“So now you’re mad,” Shar said.
“I’m not mad, Sharlyn.”
“Oh, yes you are. You called me Sharlyn.”
Beryl heaved a deep breath.
“Shar…”
“Fine,” Sharlyn said. “I don’t want to tour with your precious writer and steal any of his limelight.”
Sharlyn got up from her chair.
“I’ll just take my black, no-iPod-deal-having self home and try to write your indifference out of my system.”
“Shar, I was not being indifferent—”
“You’re being all protective of your new rock-star white boy.”
“I am not,” Beryl protested, realizing the last thing she needed to do was alienate one of her biggest stars. “I’m just trying to make sure you both get the attention you deserve, and the only way I can do that is by—”
Shar was laughing as she walked out the door.
“Shut up, Beryl,” she said. “I’m just fucking with you.”
Beryl was crying.
They were at Penn’s place, in bed, watching Primetime on ABC. It was a funny segment about women drivers. Out of nowhere, Beryl had erupted in tears.