Down South Perspective

We pick up Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer’s Memoir at the opening to Part Five. I write from forced exile on a certain (unnamed) island in the lower Caribbean, having bolted from my home at the end of the road at the bottom of Central America, at the province called Pavones, Spanish for Big Turkeys.

CHAPTER ONE

It circulated for five years, through the halls of fifteen publishers, and finally ended up with Vanguard Press, which, as you can see, is rather deep into the alphabet.

                                                                                                                                            Patrick Dennis

As I write from this little island it’s March 15, 2006. The Ides of March. Supposed to be bad luck or some such, right? Julius and Brutus, et tu Brute and so forth, a knife in the back courtesy of a friend, and… hold on… and it was a surprise? How could Caesar not see that shit coming? I guess I’m not the only one not paying attention.

But what I’m getting at: I have exactly one month to finish this book, my ticket back stateside being for April 15, and my passport expires a few days later, on the 23^rd, so I really can’t miss that flight. I suspect that if I showed up at customs back at The Fatherland with an expired passport it would be The Enemy Combatant Line for my sorry ass. But still, why the self-imposed deadline for this book?

Symmetry. Finish it here, on this little island, where it started. Started contemporaneously with Bush’s empire-building war, the second one, the one after Afghanistan and the one before the next one, probably Iran. Christ. The lies and hypocrisies, plus the greed-driven death and misery and horror while I’ve been writing this, living it, my little problems and so forth. But the lies and hypocrisies, plus the greed-driven death and misery and horror are not what’s important.

What’s important is that I believe I’ve found a publisher. For this book, the nonfiction book you are now reading. (I know: It must seem obvious to you that I found a publisher, but bear with this weird nouveau post-modern or post-post modern or deconstructionist or whatever it is shit.) A UK outfit called Humdrumming. Small, very “independent,” a bit of a co-op vibe, run by a bunch of writers and other lunatics, even some actors.

Actors. Whoa.

But this has been my plan all along: Find a UK publisher, get this book in print, then use the edition to get a U.S. deal, maybe with a mid-size house that has some balls (and will overlook my persona non grata status and all the potential lawsuits because they smell money), plus some pizzazz and distribution clout. My reasoning in going the UK-first route is this:

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

This was my runner up as a chapter epigraph (from Sylvia Plath), and holy shit is it the truth. If you’re going to write a book, actually fucking do it: Don’t visit a publisher first, their offices, not that they’d let you in. You do go in there and it’s like some sort of writer’s version of The Holocaust: Manuscripts everywhere, manuscripts stacked up like the corpses in those godawful old death camp newsreels, manuscripts as door stops, manuscripts jammed between the air conditioner and the window sash to keep the foul air in, manuscripts peeking out from other manuscripts, two manuscripts – maybe a memoir and a cookbook – riffled together like decks of playing cards shuffled but not squared; manuscripts on the doorsill with muddy boot prints on the title pages, manuscripts massively unread but all somehow soiled, and the shitball motherfucker behind the desk, if you can see him over another teetering pile, looks up from a John Grisham or Dan Brown paperback and gestures at a pile of manuscripts on the floor shaped vaguely like a chair, offering you a seat, saying with an accent from Stalag 17, “You haf a manuscript mit you? Ahhh. Put it over… zere.”

You find yourself at a publisher’s office, don’t go in the bathroom, maybe see some poor sap’s obsession and pain in there, the first chapter half gone, the pages having been torn off one by one, if you get my drift.

And listen: These are the manuscripts that made it past the mailroom, the lucky ones. I talk about Writer Hell, right? Where Bob Woodward is going to go? Writer Hell is a publisher’s mailroom. Think dumpsters brimming with obsession and pain, cackling, jackbooted goons with Rosemary’s Baby’s eyes glancing at return addresses, the cackling rising to hysteria (at a manuscript submission from Peoria), then, maybe using actual pitchforks skewering and over-the-shouldering manuscripts into the dumpsters, the cackling now harmonizing with the beep beep beep of a garbage truck in reverse, come to haul the stinking mass of manuscripts away…

…or maybe they have their own oven, a manuscript crematorium, right on the premises…

I exaggerate only slightly.

Publishers are demons, there’s no doubt about it. That was another epigraph possibility (William James).

But why the UK? Aren’t publishers all the same? Isn’t a shitball motherfucker a shitball motherfucker, notwithstanding he says tom-aaah-to and I say tom-ayyy-to? Sure, but as far as I know, at least I’m not a persona non grata over in UK publishing, not yet, on top of everything else. Plus, the Brits don’t like us Yanks and our mega-conglomerate publishing houses and our Hollywood pretensions and our George W. Fucking Bush and so forth, so with this anti-everything-Yank narrative I might actually do some reverse petard-hoisting with the UK motherfuckers, if you can wrap your mind around that convoluted allusion. I mean, right?

You have to live in some hope to get through the day.

But yes: Get this fucker in print.

There’s even some bizarre symmetry in how I hooked up with this outfit, and this will bring us back to last summer (2005), which I need to do anyway. See, some lunatics in Canada came up with a stage version of Cosmic Banditos. A play.

I shit you not. My goofball comedy about The Meaning of Life ran for ten days at an arts festival in Vancouver. And it was a hit! They were rolling in the aisles, apparently.

The mind boggles.

Aside from the mind boggling, one result was that hearing about this at Montauk I briefly felt better about myself, about ten minutes worth of that, but you take what you can get. The other thing was that the play was rave-reviewed by some nutcase up there, a smart, funny, literate nutcase. I emailed him thanking him and so forth and one thing led to another and it turned out he’s hooked up with this UK Humdrumming outfit. He reads Parts One through Five of this fucking thing and boom it looks like we have a deal. In fact, things are going so smoothly – swimmingly, as they say across the pond – that I’m waiting for the boom-lowering. Speaking of booms.

We’ll see how it goes. Like with the editing, for example.

Editing. Editors. Publishers. Last summer. Montauk. Me. Sick and sapped: A writer friend connected me with his publisher, a small, regional one that was impressed by my track record (and being small and regional didn’t know I’m a persona non grata) and wanted to read this, so I sent Parts One through Four. I got a quick initial response: Having read the first few chapters of Part One, the head person there, the only person there since it’s a one-woman show, emails me saying she likes it… but…

…but looking at all my Word files and extrapolating to how long this book will be, she says, “Your book should come in at about three-hundred or so pages.” Says this having only read the first few chapters.

A question: Didn’t the words I don’t have to read your book to know how long it should be sink in, plus my attitude about that? You know, my view of demented editors and so forth? I mean it’s one thing to think what she was thinking, but how the fuck could she say it to me? (Note for this excerpt: “I don’t have to read your book to know how long it should be” were among the first words spoken to me by my Zero editor in 2000. This other editor read about that, and how I felt about it, which was somewhat negatively. Seems she forgot.)

I let her read the whole fucking thing. She wants to publish it. I even let her do some editing on Part One. All the while I’m thinking Sayo-fucking-A-nara, Jack. But I let her jump through hoops and get excited so then I could say, Nahhh.

No slack cutting. I am not in the mood.

#

This excerpt, like my previous one, which deals with my thoughts on James Frey and his false memoir, A Million Little Pieces, both have to do with my book’s through-line about being a writer. This is a bit misleading in that my book is only peripherally about my writing life, and my view of lying sacks of shit like James Frey.

This book is mainly about my loss of the home I built in paradise. (Along the way, you’ll also find out why Sean Penn wished me “something resembling death.”)

Click here to find out about the Special Edition of Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer’s Memoir, and a Tale of a Paradise Lost, which is up for advance sale now. Or: Click here to go right to the Humdrumming store and buy the book. (You’ll be entered in the give-away drawing whether you read about it or not.)

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