yustyoking

Publish or Parish

 

I like women. Heap me together with the California rockers Louis XIV singing their song “Finding Out True Love Is Blind”: I like women in all shapes, colors, sizes and personalities. When I grew up in the Stone Age, this wouldn’t have been an issue. Times have changed. Today— as we all know— if you’re not gay, transsexual, transgender and ambidextrous, well, the creative world has no place for you. At all! This is understandable. Back in the day, the straight world had it good and “homos” suffered every conceivable indignity. Payback is a bitch! Now that they’ve got some turf to call their own, why should I expect them to share? I shouldn’t. They don’t.

This all happened so long ago, I feel I can now tell about it. I even checked back with the principals, chiefly the lady. “You want to write about what?! ” she asked. “F-F-F**k you, Kevin! You cretin! You idiot! You jerk!” she wailed over the phone, getting into it with gusto. Then she started to laugh.

“So I can write about it?’

“For God’s sake, Kevin, it’s water under the bridge. I’m an old lady now. I got grandchildren. Are you going to hit an old lady?”

“Am I going to hit on you? Sure, you sexy beast!”

“You write whatever you need to write. Give it your best shot, you f**ker!”

            Yes!

Louis CK can make a total idiot of himself on his comedy show and the man’s a hero. When I make a total fool of myself, why am I a villain?

 

****************************************************

 

At Moosegrave College, I wrote a column for our school newspaper, The Antler Daily. My classmates churned out boilerplate political rhetoric about “ousting the pigs” and “burn, baby, burn” and “down wid cabitalism.” I wrote creative little short stories that drove Skip, the poor editor, crazy. “Jesus Christ, Kevin!” he advised me. “Write like Mustafa X! Write like Pam the Spam Farrow! Read their columns. Twelve column inches that everyone can read and understand. ‘Burn down City Hall! Stop the war!’ Done! Half our readers don’t know what the hell you are saying! Short, declarative sentences, friend! ‘Storm the U.S. Capitol! Off the pigs!’ What’s so hard about that?!”

“But they already write that!’

“Kevin…” he growled, patience— and discussion— at an end. The clock was ticking. I wrote faster. By the time he discontinued my column, I had enough lyrical shorts to publish a small book. Since they all devolved around the main character, Ken Fernwhistle, I rearranged the chronology and created the chapters of a short novel entitled In Search of Solace.

Also, my classmate Jane Gaynor graduated a year ahead of me and she was already getting published in The New Yorker. “If Janie can crack the coconut, so can I!” I assumed.

Enter the dragon. I had two uncles.

Mitch, my mama’s very successful brother, was an academic, teaching at an Ivy League university. He smoked up a storm, showed up uninvited in our home and, upon reading my short stories, gave me this advice: “Let’s rap! If you wanna get published (purposely sloppy language geared to the younger generation), you gotta go t’ New York and sleep with an editor at a major publishing house. They’re all faggots. Once you pull down your pants and service the guy, he’ll help you learn the ropes and publish your stuff.”

This was an extremely cynical approach— to say the least— the equivalent of the Hollywood casting couch. Starlets complain that in order to get a part, they have to go down on their knees and bestow sexual favors on note-worthy producers. Uncle Mitch wanted me to accept a similar apprenticeship.

Sexually nervous as a child, extremely neurotic, I couldn’t do it. Let’s say I lacked maturity.

My other uncle, my dad’s brother-in-law, had two alternatives. Two! Listen, our family came from New Yawk, I felt blessed that we were so well connected. My Uncle Sy’s first suggestion was the Salzman-Shultz Literary Agency on Gramercy. I went to see old man Salzman who smoked Cuban cigars, squinted at me through the smoke and seemed to blame me that his eyes were red. “I’ll look at it,” he muttered, holding my manuscript by the extreme right corner like it was dog poo and he didn’t want to get his hands dirty. “Our reading fee is $75.”

Back then, that was a major chunk of change! I didn’t have $75. Very resentfully, my parents coughed up the money. “My son the starving artist!” ranted my dad. “The great I – am! Mr. Creative Writer! Hoo, hoo, hooee!” he laughed derisively. Swallowing my bile, I stood and took the abuse. I needed the money.

“This work,” wrote Salzman, “needs the guiding hand of a Mephistopheles, but has been carved out by some lesser mortal. Where the individual chapters need to be connected with cement, you have pasted yours together with water. Cracking at the edges, the center will not hold. Never has so much effort been wasted on so few results. People will little note nor long remember what you have written here. Your main character should be struggling against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Instead, a poor player upon the stage, he piddles away his time over internal musings that wouldn’t interest a frog. Assuming frogs can read, which, personally, I seriously doubt! No sale!”

Not wanting to be a grouch, I contacted my uncle. “Your tip cost me $75 and he doesn’t seem inclined to sell my manuscript,” I pointed out over the phone, long distance.

“Well, old Salzy is a macher of means, I must say,” said my uncle. “It’s not his fault that your creative talent is unsalable.”

Ouch! That hurt!

“You should try a different route,” said my uncle. “Go to LMNOPQ Agency on Broadway.”

“I don’t have any more money.”

“I’ll square the account.”

Well, that was a different kettle of fish. No one ever called my Uncle Sy generous.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” insisted my mom, sitting across from me at the dinner table. “You’re just trying for the wrong profession. You should be writing advertising copy!” Pointing to the label on the dessert tin, she handed it to me. “Squashberry Olde Tyme Key Lime Pye,” I read. “A delight on the palette, a joy to behold, with the luxurious ambiance of the Florida Cays.”

That’s my mom, always looking for a reasonable solution. She served us Canadian bacon for breakfast, to save us the schlep to Montreal.

After dinner, she handed me the Fred Steele catalog. He’s the Ralph Lauren of mail order. It flopped open to a color photo of what appeared to be an orange, plastic dustpan. The boldface text across the top informed me it was

 

************* The Jeffy Handy-Man® Snow Scooper! *************

 

Breathlessly, the italicized text continued:

Save wear and tear on back and knees this winter with the Jeffy Handy-Man® Snow Scooper. Simply scoop snow off stairways, porches and other hard-to-reach areas with the Jeffy Handy-Man.® Ergonomic handle, laboratory tested flat design. Choose any of three ultra-bright Find-in-the-Snow™ colors, Orange Maple, Powder Blue or Roasted Gold. $9.95   Made in China

 

When I told my folks that I wasn’t gonna do this thang, my dad sneered, “Yeah. As always, my son the ungrateful, lazy twerp!”   

 

*****************************************************

 

Sitting, nervously sweating in the waiting room, it felt worse than a visit to the dentist. I read the brochure. “We at LMNOPQ Agency are deeply concerned about the welfare of our talent. Ours is a very hands-on process, coaxing and nursing your book project through every step of the way from congenial first thought to finished product, gracing the shelves of bookstores everywhere. However, our involvement doesn’t end there, by any means. We track sales, make sure you get paid, seek foreign rights, help you file your tax returns, provide you with fresh ideas for your next endeavor and , if you so request, we will even help you spend your money! Ha ha! Hands-on, my dear, truly means hands-on!”

Finding myself as erect as a tent pole, I could see why my uncle recommended this particular massage parlor cum literary agency. Yes!!! I am thinking.  I’se de writer! Put yo’ hands ALL OVER ME!

Apparently, the repeated bus trips from Maryland to New York were getting to me. A royal pain in the ass, how many lunches at Salim’s House of Kebob on East 27th Street was I expected to eat?

In small print across the bottom, the brochure announced, “We accept manuscripts in English, French and Farsi. No submissions in Pashto, Dari or Swahili, please.”

“Miss Darvish will see you now,” the snooty receptionist, wearing rhinestone-encrusted eyeglasses on a cord and dressed in a rose twinset, informed me. “Room three.”

Walking down the gray carpeted hall, I felt like I was on my way to an execution. Room Three. Timidly, I knocked on the doorframe. A woman behind a desk looked up.

And there she was, my Madonna! Parish Darvish, fresh from Tehran by way of Brooklyn.

“Come in, sit down!” she said, her fangs as pearly white and gleaming as the Big Bad Wolf’s. She was 30 years old, ten years older than me, amazing to look at, a glory to behold. “It’s very hard to launch unpublished authors nobody has ever heard of,” she explained graciously. “They’re a very hard sell. I’m only doing this as a favor to your Uncle Sy. He’s a crazy dentist, but my kids swear by him and their teeth look great, braces and all. Tell Sy ‘hi.’ ”

“I will! I shall!” I stammered, sitting, dumping my book bag incongruously on her immaculately polished floor. Desperately, I pulled out still another copy of my ms. Handing it across the desk to her, even I could see the way she sighed despondently. Another unpublished author! Another sheep in wolf’s clothing. Another amateur.

“Normally,” she pointed out, “I handle women’s literature. Romance novels, self-help books, that sort of thing.” The Brooklyn accent dissolved any pretense of upper class decorum. “I always say, ‘Never bring me a manuscript that hasn’t already been read and critiqued by at least five people.’ ” Arching her eyebrows, she waited.

“Half Moosegrave College has already read this stuff,” I blurted.

“Oh,” she answered, neither impressed nor unimpressed. “Let me look at it.” With me sitting there examining my fingernails, she proceeded to speed-read the material. “This will need a lot of editing,” she announced. “Here, page 23, you have a typo. What does ‘doobie’ refer to? Who is Harris? ‘Stoned out of my gourd,’ is that your coinage or common usage?”

I fielded her questions and sweat like a horse. Mercifully kind, she kept my manuscript. “I’ll call you with my comments,” she promised, confirming our home phone number in Maryland.

And she called! “Kevin,” she told me, “It’s good! You can go with this. Now, I want you to go back and develop the characters. You’ve got the thread, now I want the whole cloth. More, baby! Give me the rest.”

Sheisse! I didn’t know there was any more. Groaning and dredging, I extended the reach of my story, bulking out each chapter to what Parish considered “full length.”

“I don’t market short manuscripts,” she explained didactically over the phone when I told her my larder was empty. “You have to come through for me, Kevin. I need something the publishers can sink their teeth into. Not postcards, book-length manuscripts. Also, let’s up the thriller quotient by changing the title to In Search of the Solstice.”

I went back and wrote some more.

Yes, Amon DÜÜL II ‘s “Dance of the Lemmings” (Tanz der Lemminge) was one of my favorite record albums, but when you’re doing it in real life, it’s less fun.

Third time around, she said, “Okay Fernwhistle, why do you disparage Arabs?”

“Arabs? Oh! That’s not Arabs, that’s Abdel Gamal Nasser. In 1956, he nationalized the Suez Canal —”

“I know what he did, Kevin! I wasn’t born under a stone. You have to help me on this one, baby. I’m Moslem. Nobody wants to publish an anti-Moslem diatribe.”

“It’s not — What do you want me to do?”

“The Shahada says ‘There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.’ Bringing Nasser into the equation opens a giant can of worms. Blue pencil it, baby, blue pencil it! It doesn’t affect your storyline.”

That entire section got deleted.

True to her word, Parish got me an option on the property from Shondell Press. “We usually publish women’s fiction,” Oscar Shondell told me genially over the phone from New York, “but if Parish Darvish is your agent… Well, you are in good hands.” Hearing him chuckle, I almost expected him to add “… with Allstate.”

“I appreciate your interest,” I told him somewhat breathlessly. My God in heaven, it was happening! Hallelujah! I was going to ascend to the level of “published author.”

“Normally,” he pointed out, “we never take first-time authors. They’re very hard to peddle in the marketplace. People want to read books by the authors they know.”

“If you never take first-time authors, how does anyone ever get started?” I asked.

“As I was saying,” replied Oscar, “in your case, we’re making an exception.”

 

He delivered me into the liverish hands of his top editor, Margot Roitgart, a Ukrainian Jewess. “A nice Jewish boy like you,” she said over the phone.” What a shanda it is, that you defend the Arabs.”

“I don’t defend the Arabs— ”

“East versus West. Why do you tiptoe right up to the issue and never even mention the obvious? The Suez crisis. In 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser…”

Yada, yada, yada.

“Of course,” she added, “there’s a lot of fat that needs to be trimmed from your manuscript. Also, we’re changing the title to Searching for God in Strange Places.”

 

****************************************************

 

After the trimming process, I didn’t hear anything for six weeks.

“Call them,” insisted my mom through gritted teeth.

Stoking up my courage on cigarettes, I made the call.

“Oh, Kevin, hi!” said Oscar Shondell himself, when his secretary finally connected me. From his tone, you’d think we spoke daily. “Didn’t you get my letter?”

“Well, no.”

“All right, hold on.” When he came back on the line, he was all apologies. “Geez, we goofed! I don’t think Sharon— my secretary— ever sent it out. Kevin, the thing is, we’re letting the option lapse. We’re not going to publish. The thing is, I’ve had my readers look over your material and it lacks spontaneity. It seems tired and overworked. Sorry, but that’s how it is, old buddy. Next time, write something fresh and robust. All the best! And you will be getting this in writing. Bye-cycle!”

He hung up.

Shattered, I called Parish. “Hmmm, ha, hmmm, ha,” she hummed into the phone as I poured out my grief. “I’d heard something about this, yes. I thought you guys were working out the divorce amongst yourselves. I mean, I can call Oscar, but what good would it do? He’s already decided not to publish. Now, there are a couple of outstanding fees. The copying fee, two bicycle messenger fees, one reader fee and, of course, postage. I get it to $74.20.”

“Fine,” I howled. “Talk to my Uncle Sy.”

“I did. He said you’d handle it yourself.”

“I don’t have the money,” I wept into the phone. “I’m a senior in college. I don’t have the money.”

“Are you finished?”

“No, I’m Swedish.”

“What about your folks?” she asked icily.

“I’m already in hock to them for $75 for another literary agent.”

“Kevin,” she lectured me, “You shouldn’t be telling me that! Don’t tell me you went behind my back to another agent.”

“No, no, no, that was before your time.”

“Well, I can absorb the costs, Kevin, but you should know that we are running a business here. It’s very irresponsible of you to run up bills that you then cannot pay. Frankly, I thought you were better than that.”

“So what should I do?” I asked, drained. “Kill myself?”

“All options remain on the table,” said Parish Darvish, hanging up on me.

When I told my mom, she said, “Bitch!”

When I told my dad, he said, “What she meant was, when you earn that money on your next summer job, you should call her and square accounts.”

“Huh?” I asked. “Is that what she meant?”

“Of course! What else could she have meant?” asked my dad, ever helpful.

 

I’m still waiting to become a “published author.”

 

I impart this knowledge now because I find myself in similar straits regarding my latest creation, Tolstoy’s Underwear. Never in the history of human events, at least not since cave painting, has such dynamic literary genius…  yada, yada, yada. Computers, laptops, iPhones, social media, the publishing industry is a constantly dwindling phenomenon. Sincerely,

 

as ever, yours truly, Kevin Feingold, Esquire, unpublished author!!!!!!!!!!

 

Dollar signs for eyeballs, no lit agent nor publisher is the least bit interested in my work. Listen, forget about writing one piddling bestseller! Anybody can do that! No, in order to join their stable, you gotta write one bestseller a year for ten years! They don’t even respond to my enquiries. A stone wall. Such is the world of publishing. If you telephone, the receptionist bawls you out for wasting her time by doing anything as stupid as writing a book!

Getting nowhere fast, I make a pdf file and blast it out to the 22 email addresses in my Address Book. I post it on my blog. I go on Twitter and drive everyone crazy by shamelessly hawking the book. I plug it on the MC Enthusiast chat room (no particular reason, I just like hogs), the Moosegrave College alumni website and the German polemics website Standpunkt.

The next day, with trembling hands, I click on my emails. “L’oeuf ” as they say in tennis. Zero. Nada. Nothing. Not even my cousin Ricky in Seattle has felt impelled enough to look up from other activities and acknowledge receipt of my masterpiece.

 

Tired of nickel and diming this project, I decide to turn to the one group of people who I absolutely know love books, the Book Place section of my local newspaper! Gotcha! I write a longish, very exact email:

 

Subject: Lance Chevalier loves it!

Hello, I’m an unpublished author living in Oxburg, Maryland. While out drinking the other night, I met a man named Lance Chevalier who really liked my book idea so much, he said he’d recommend publishing my screed to e-book publishing giant Tex Brazos. He says he and Tex go way back and my book is “The greatest thing since sliced bread.” Having already had some experience in the baking industry, I took that as a huge compliment.

Now the reason I’m writing 2 U is to include a pdf file, something which Mr. Chevalier and Tex Brazos do not yet have. Pls forward it to Tex Brazos! Hope you like them apples! I could send the pdf directly to the Library of Congress, but I don’t think they publish anything but government documents. Many, many government documents. Biggest suppository of documents since the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

As my dear old dad used to say when confronting electrical repairs, “Don’t touch that switch!”

Which brings me to the next point of departure in this somewhat verbose but extremely erudite and lugubrious communiqué, namely…

 

It goes on from there for about three pages. Sheer nerves! Longest email I ever wrote. I figured, two months hence, I’ll get some lame brushoff like “Unfortunately, your work does not meet our requirements at this time. We wish you every success in your endeavors.” After a two month wait, right? Who among us writers hasn’t been through that experience?

Instead, I get an almost instantaneous response. Like, two minutes later. Wow! They must be hot for my stuff…

 

Subject: Thank you for your enquiry

This is an automated response. Please do not reply. Due to the high volume of traffic, the Book Place web address is no longer accepting unsolicited emails. Any future inquiries from you will be relegated to our spam folder. We wish you every success in your endeavors!

 

            Nej, men va’ fan?! as we say in Swedish = WTF.