My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (10 page)

“There’s more behind the TV stand,” I confessed.

Sarah said, “Let’s count.” We tallied them up. There were ninety-nine. Sarah began to sing,
“Ninety-nine bottles of pee on your wall, ninety-nine bottles of pee…”
She trailed off. “I can’t believe I’m leaving you,” she said.

I picked up the song, and continued on, sadly:
“Take one down, pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of pee…”

*

Sarah was gone, and all I had was my pee bottles and a ruptured ankle that buzzed with excruciating pain if I brushed it against anything. I was as hobbled as the dude in
Misery
, but without a number one fan. Besides the sheer effort involved, it seemed to me that to simply bag up all the bottles, a dozen at a time, and crutch my way to the street to toss them out would be squandering a unique and bizarre opportunity. It’s not every day you end up with an arsenal of ninety-nine bottles of pee, and though I wasn’t sure what exactly I might do with this kind of unusual stockpile, my instincts told me I’d somehow find a use for them, as part of a prank or a practical joke, perhaps, or some darker form of mischief.

Stuck in my tiny sweatbox room all summer, I spent hours at a time online, exploring the Internet’s odd, dark reaches and fanciful buttes. I researched how far flying squirrels and flying fish can actually fly, then watched clips of the kidnapped journalist Daniel Pearl’s beheading. I absorbed every beat of each national news story, first on the
New York Times
site and then on the sites of the local papers where the incident had gone down, enjoying the battles waged in the comments sections, which were often unrelated to the topic at hand, like a discussion—after an article about an armored-truck heist on
KCStar.com
—of the Royals’ relief-pitching woes. Before long, I was clicking on obscure links sent to me by relatives I barely knew, and reading mass e-mails I would’ve deleted in an instant in the days before my reverse jackknife off Mike Kozura’s roof.

An e-mail landed in my in-box—“The Times Square Literary Agency Announces ‘Great American Novel’ Writing Contest!”—and I read it carefully through. It looked pretty standard: send us a copy of your book and a sixty-dollar reading fee, and if the stars line up right you’ll win a cash prize, along with the promise of agency representation. This particular entreaty had a few weirdly shaped cornices, though. For one, even though the contest was sponsored by the Times Square Literary Agency, the address for submissions was on Mission Street in San Francisco. Also, an awards ceremony was to take place in New York City in just six weeks, hardly enough time to collect all the entries and give a panel of judges an adequate chance to read through them. And another thing seemed strange—the e-mail specified that any book was eligible, fiction or nonfiction, no matter when it had been written or whether it had been published or not. But despite its whiff of fishiness, I forwarded it to a couple of high-school kids I’d met on tour who were aspiring writers, and also to my dad, who’d just self-published a book of autobiographical vignettes called
Brooklyn Boy
. Then I dropped it into one of my e-mail folders and moved on, probably to watch eighties rap videos on YouTube—“Iesha” by Another Bad Creation was a current favorite.

The next night, another e-mail caught my attention—“The Golden Gate Literary Agency Announces ‘The Next Hemingway’ Writing Contest!” The details were identical to those in the previous e-mail, with the same address for submissions, but for this contest the entry fee was eighty-five bucks instead of sixty. I clicked around the Web and discovered a half dozen other “literary agencies” of questionable provenance, all listing the same office address, responsible for a handful of dubious writing contests, including the Golden Typewriter Awards, the Guggenheimer Writers’ Circle Awards, and the O’Henry Awards (different from the esteemed, legit O. Henry Prize). Sketchy, no doubt, but I simply deleted the e-mail and hauled myself up to put
Black Knight
in the DVD player and pee into a tall, empty Evian bottle that one of my housemates had left behind in the kitchen.

Then, two days later, blooping into my in-box—“Times Square Literary Agency Announces New Contest Categories!” The e-mail explained that their Great American Novel writing contest was expanding from six categories (Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction) to eighteen, and that they were awarding six prizes in each category instead of just one. The more I poked around, the more I got the sense that someone was blasting out thousands of e-mails, sounding the call for these shady contests, then sitting back and watching the checks roll in. It was clever, in a sense, maybe ingenious, but over the years I’d always drawn a sharp distinction between hustlers and scam artists. Hustlers: me and the other eleven sad sacks scalping tickets outside a Chicago Blackhawks game in mid-January, freezing our fucking asses off, and heading home with a hundred bucks in our pockets, if we were lucky; or the kid in Albuquerque, say, who used to sell me nickel bags of weed outside the Laundromat at Central and San Mateo. Scam artists: the guys outside Soldier Field before the Rolling Stones concert dealing counterfeits, which are handsome enough to fool the untrained eye but don’t scan at the gate and get turned away; the dude who takes a twenty from you, presses a Ziploc bag of oregano into your hands, and darts off. Hustlers get you what you want at a price you’re willing to pay; the “hustle” is convincing you that you want what we’ve got. Scammers abuse your trust and hang you out to dry—they’re the ones who make things tough for your everyday honest hustler, and among hustlers, no one is more despised.

I read back through all three of the contest e-mails. It became crystal clear that some piece-of-shit scam artist was preying on aspiring writers just hoping for a wisp of recognition. I considered this an added insult—nobody deserves to be swindled, but it took a particular kind of cruelty to bilk sweet, earnest, well-meaning writers, especially the ones who’d worked hard enough to actually finish a book and were now struggling to get it out there and read by people. Still, the world’s full of hostile scams, as I well knew from the dozen hours a day I was spending online, and in the Internet’s Wild West, I was no sheriff, just a lonely homesteader trying to get by. The question was: What was I going to do about it?

About a week after Sarah left, my dad stopped by my house. A year before, at the age of seventy-one, he’d retired from the University of Michigan Health Service, where for almost three decades he’d managed the janitorial staff and overseen building repairs. He now reveled in his new freedoms, reading books he’d always meant to read, taking theater classes, and writing plays and stories. We’d had a party for him at a local mom-and-pop shop called Nicola’s Books when
Brooklyn Boy
had come back from the printer’s.

But in retirement, money was tight, and I often got texts from friends who’d seen my dad hustling tickets outside U of M football, basketball, and hockey games, and concerts at Hill Auditorium. I was sitting on my front porch when he pulled up in his ’81 Ford Fairmont, muffler hanging by a rusty tendril, clattering along the pavement, sending up a geyser of pink sparks. He waved and cut the engine and the Fairmont went into its customary death rattle and coughed up a cloud of green smoke. “Check it out!” he said, crossing the street to my house, a wide U.S. Postal Service flat-rate box in his hands. “I got your e-mail. I’m sending
Brooklyn Boy
to that contest you told me about!”

Oh fuck.
He gave me a hug and sat next to me. I said to him, “Don’t do it, Dad. It’s my bad. I shouldn’t have sent you that thing. It’s a scam.”

“No it’s not. I went to the worldwide website.” He told me he was sending in four copies of his book, entering four separate contests—the Great American Novel, the Next Hemingway, the Golden Typewriter, and the Tom Wolfe Memorial Challenge. He’d written a check for $265.

We haggled about it for twenty minutes. Here was my dad, seventy-two years old, who couldn’t afford to get his tailpipe fixed and was on his way to scalp tickets at the Ann Arbor Summer Festival for the gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock, about to flush a couple hundred bucks down the shitter. But he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t being more supportive. “Maybe they’ll like
Brooklyn Boy
,” he said forlornly. “You told me it was good.”

“Dude, I’m telling you, it’s just some fucking scam.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know. I just know. I mean, Tom Wolfe’s still alive! Why would they have a
Memorial
Challenge? Look, I’ll see if I can figure out a little more about it, just give me a few days.”

“Today’s the deadline,” he said. “I’m sending this in. I want people to read my book. Finding an agent’s the first step to getting a real publisher.” He turned the package over in his hands, addressed to the Times Square Literary Agency in San Francisco. “I better go. Sweet Honey in the Rock’s an early-arriving crowd.”

I watched my dad drive away, then crutched back into the house and crawled up the stairs to my room. In a fever, I slapped and Googled my way through dozens of websites, trying to peel back the curtain on the Times Square Literary Agency’s sleazy Wizard of Oz. It only took about half an hour to find him—his name was Lon Hackney, an appropriate name for a failed writer, which is what he seemed to be. A film-biz veteran, he’d written a somewhat prescient book in the nineties about Hollywood’s overreliance on stars to deliver blockbusters at the box office, which was largely ignored. Since then, he’d freelanced for a series of dodgy Internet news sites like the Bong Smokers’ Review, published a couple more books through a vanity press, and then, a few years before, had created a series of nationwide music and film conferences which he dubbed “The Future Is Now,” where turnout had been dismal, according to a couple of disgruntled accounts I tracked down from those who’d paid to become sponsors. The writing contests appeared to be his latest concoction—meant, perhaps, to exact revenge on a publishing world he’d found impenetrable, but actually victimizing writers like himself. I could hardly think of a more cynical, mean-spirited swindle. To be fair, I knew it was possible that I was only jumping to conclusions. In a couple of online interviews, he spoke earnestly about the role of independent literary agents in helping new authors gain exposure. Reading between the lines, though, I could smell the bullshit.

Night had fallen. I looked up from my laptop, and in the darkness of my room, quietly humming, stood more than a hundred bottles of pee, proudly at attention, like soldiers ready to be shipped off to battle. In an odd, deranged trance, I tucked four bottles into a plastic grocery bag, put the bag inside my backpack, strapped it on, and scooted awkwardly downstairs, keeping my swollen ankle raised high. I pulled myself across the floor of the kitchen and down to the dank basement where I have my
Found
office. It’s a true fact that at the University of Michigan I lived in the same exact dorm room on Prescott Hall in East Quad that had been inhabited thirty years before by a student named Theodore Kaczynski, who became the Unabomber. No doubt I was channeling a bit of old Kaczynski’s rage and maniacal righteousness as I composed a six-page handwritten letter to Lon Hackney, lambasting him for being such a fraud. I signed it, “A Concerned Citizen.” Finally, I cracked the folds on a USPS flat-rate box, placed the bottles of pee inside, and stuffed it with Styrofoam packing peanuts to keep the bottles in place and make sure they didn’t pop open in transit. I folded my letter and squeezed it into the box.

Before I sealed it up, though, I second-guessed myself. I remembered a story I’d heard from a scalping pal of mine in Chicago who went by the name of Lobster. Lobster had told me about something this dude called Thirty-fifth Street Frankie—who I’d met a few times—had once felt compelled to do. Some guy owed Frankie eight grand—maybe for tickets, maybe a gambling debt, who knows—and he kept laughing it off whenever Frankie levied a threat. At last, Frankie hired four giant Southside thugs (friends of his, probably) to take care of the matter. One night when the guy came home from the bar, they grabbed him outside of his apartment, tied his hands behind his back, blindfolded him, shoved him into the trunk of a Lincoln, drove him up to Wisconsin, and left the car deep in the woods for two days. Then they drove him back to Chicago and dropped him off in the same alley they’d snatched him from, still tied up and wearing the blindfold but without a scratch. All they said, before roaring off in the Lincoln, was, “Hey, buddy, fly right.”

“Can you imagine?” Lobster had said to me. “Two days in the trunk of a car, literally shitting yourself, not sure if you’re going to live, and the whole time wondering who you wronged. And the message wasn’t ‘Pay Frankie,’ it was ‘Fly right.’ He might’ve guessed it was Frankie, but he probably had debts all over town. Frankie got his money the next week.”

I had no idea how true Lobster’s story was, but something about it was inspiring. Down in my basement, reading over my long, chicken-scratched letter to Lon, I realized there would be something splendidly ominous in sending him the bottles of pee without any note of ordinary, petty complaint. Most likely, he’d just shrug off my criticisms and tear the note up. Instead, why not let him be haunted, like the dude in the trunk of the Lincoln, led to a deeper reflection of who might be angry with him, and why? I ripped up my Kaczynski letter and with a black ballpoint pen carved a new note, tracing the words fifty times over: “
FLY RIGHT
.”

The next day, I drove forty minutes south on M-23 and mailed the box from a post office in Toledo, Ohio.

*

That was only the first shot fired. As August edged in and the dog days of summer wore on, I packaged up fresh pee bottles every two or three days and cruised around Lower Michigan, northern Ohio, and northern Indiana, left foot on the pedals, right foot up on the dash in a bag of ice, scouting post offices and mailing packages. I preferred post offices with an automated scale in the lobby so I could pay the flat-rate postage and drop my box through the parcel slot without coming face-to-face with any postal clerks. Then I’d crutch it back to the van and blast tunes on my triumphant drive home, flush with adrenaline, like George McFly in
Back to the Future
after finally punching out his nemesis, Biff. I may have been a brokenhearted writer blowing $9.85 to mail his own urine to California, but I felt like a fucking cowboy, a vigilante, rolling into town on my steed to dole out my own brand of frontier justice. I never fully lost track of just how psychotic all of this would’ve seemed to anyone else, so as with most weird, fucked-up things you find yourself doing in life, I kept these outings a secret. But to me, at the time, it all made sense. It even seemed courageous and noble. I was just trying to make America right again.