My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (11 page)

In response, seemingly, the e-mails from Lon Hackney’s phony contests intensified. “Great American Novel Deadline Extended!” “Reserve Your Gold-Area Booth For The Golden Typewriter Awards Gala!” “Tom Wolfe Memorial Challenge Now Accepting Submissions in 12 Languages!” I’d lie in bed sweating, gulping mouthfuls of Advil to keep my ankle from throbbing, and growing more and more incensed at Hackney’s bold, unapologetic deceits. At last, I’d haul myself to the basement and compose short, blunt grenades of condemnation, writing with my left hand to disguise my scrawl: “
STOP IT LON
,” “
NO MORE CONTESTS
,” “
GET RICH? DIE TRYING
.” One night, sealing pee bottles into one of the flat-rate boxes, I cut my hand on its sharp, gummed edge, and went ahead and smeared blood all over my note before tucking it inside. I was half Travis Bickle, half Jimmy Stewart from
Rear Window
—laid up, certain I was witness to a troubling crime, but unable to do much about it or get anyone to pay attention.

One weekend in late August, just to get outside, I crutched across Wheeler Park to a house party on Main Street and drank a pint of Maker’s by myself, watching young punk drifters twirl fire in the yard. Wasted, I called Sarah in the East Bay. “Oh my God, are you okay?” she said. “Your voice sounds really weird. Not just drunk, but weird. Are you crying?” I tried to explain my battles with Lon Hackney, but I’d drunkenly conflated Hackney with Sarah’s new boyfriend, Ghostshrimp, and I kept saying one name when I meant to say the other. In a certain sense, they’d merged in my mind, even when I was sober—not only was Hackney robbing from the poor to give to himself, it sometimes seemed to me, he’d stolen my girl, too. “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” said Sarah. “I’m hanging up now.”

I made it home, dragged myself up to my room, opened a bottle of water, and took a long, mighty swig—but it wasn’t water, it was my own goddamn pee. Even through my rigorous drunkenness, the taste was horrendously, mind-meltingly sour. I gagged and spit out what I could into the trash can, accidentally leaning my weight onto my useless right foot. A bolt of hot pain lanced up my leg and I crashed to the floor, crying to myself, full of sorrow and self-pity. I desperately had to get the taste of pee out of my mouth, but the only thing within reach was a small carton of blue Play-Doh that I’d bought as a gift for my nephew. In utter defeat, I clawed loose a couple of doughy chunks and chewed on them until I passed out.

Late one night, a new page appeared on the Times Square Literary Agency website, an overview of a conference Lon Hackney had put together in San Francisco the previous summer called “The Future Is Now”—apparently he’d been recycling the name from previous scams. This new conference featured an awards ceremony where authors were invited to read from their work (and rent vendors’ booths for a hefty fee). Twenty thousand people had attended the day-long event in Golden Gate Park, Hackney boasted. He’d posted a dozen pictures, perhaps to try to legitimize the festival in the minds of any doubters—especially, I figured, his pee-bottle provocateur. In the photos, folks read from self-published books in front of a tiny bandshell to a half dozen people seated in folding chairs, while joggers, roller-bladers, tourists, and young mothers with strollers sidled past without a glance. Twenty or thirty folding tables had been erected haphazardly across a concrete plaza, and authors hovered behind them with stacks of their own books, lonely as Yankee Stadium ice cream vendors during an April snow squall. Yellow, blue, and green balloons clung to trees in sad clumps, draped with wet streamers, and amid the gloom, a woman dressed as a clown, wearing a blue Afro wig and face paint, stood picking her nose. If Hackney’s intent in posting the pictures had been to lend credibility and glamour to his writing contests and their associated events, he’d failed miserably.

I noticed in one photo a young, pretty woman seated behind a table stacked with books, which I presumed she’d written, holding up a copy, and smiling wanly. Her name was visible on the book’s cover—Ondrea Wales—and after a quick Google search, I found my way to her website. She’d written three teen novels for a major publisher, and in her author photo looked confident and bright. I dropped her an e-mail:
Investigating Lon Hackney and “Future Is Now” conferences. Please call.
My phone rang the next night—Ondrea.

“It was one of the most humiliating days of my life,” she told me. “I’d been hearing from so many people that these days publishers don’t have the resources they used to, that if you want your book to get out there, you have to do it yourself. I paid five hundred dollars for that table, and sold two books the whole day. It was a disaster.” Ondrea told me that she was the only one there who hadn’t self-published their book or put it out through a vanity press. The most embarrassing moment of her day was when an editor from another publishing house had wandered by and stopped to chat. “She was aghast that I was out there—she thought my publisher had set it up. I confessed that I’d set it up myself, and she just kind of smiled at me like I was a crazy person and walked away. I felt duped. I felt lied to. The whole thing had been misrepresented to me in every way.”

She got a little upset, just thinking back on it all, but her voice was sweet, even silky, and as we talked on, I gazed at Ondrea’s author photo on her website, aware of the beginnings of a crush, the tips of my fingers tingling. I asked her if she felt so out of place simply because she was an established author surrounded by self-published folks, and she said no, that wasn’t it. “It’s not that I didn’t belong there because I thought I was better than the other authors,” she said. “It’s because
nobody
belonged there. The awards gala was a joke.
Everybody
was disappointed.” A conference aimed toward self-published authors could still be dignified and inspiring, she said, but this one lacked even the slightest semblance of anybody’s effort or care. No press, no promotion. People had come from all over the country, only to get up on stage and read for ten minutes to a crowd of three. Twenty thousand people? There might’ve been twenty thousand people in Golden Gate Park that day, she said, but there were never more than a couple dozen at the bandshell. Ondrea lived in New York City, and she’d flown to San Francisco to participate. One guy she’d met, a children’s book writer, had traveled all the way from Belgium. “He was really disconsolate,” Ondrea said. “But he—and all of us—tried to put on a brave face, at least till we got home. Who wants to admit that they’ve been scammed?”

We talked for another forty-five minutes, the longest conversation I’d had with anyone since Sarah had left for California. Ondrea was likable, upbeat, thoughtful, and perceptive, and apparently a fairly successful writer with a healthy dose of talent—the kind of girl I often fantasized about meeting. I thought of Lon Hackney, that piece of shit, and my swollen ankle pulsed and throbbed. It was one thing to gyp my dad for a couple hundred bucks, it was another to put sweet, darling Ondrea Wales through a day of hellish awkwardness and shame.

“How’d you get interested in all of this, anyway?” asked Ondrea, a flirtatious note of curiosity creeping into her voice. I told her my dad had been suckered in, and explained that I’d been sending hate mail to Lon Hackney, without mentioning any specifics.

“I met Lon,” she said.

My ears perked up. “Yeah? What was he like?” I hadn’t been able to find any pictures of him online, I told her.

“He was—and look, I don’t have anything against fat people—but he was a fat, sweaty slob.”

I laughed nervously. My bedroom was as hot as a sauna, and I was sticky with sweat; I hadn’t showered in a week and hadn’t shaved in two. “Really?” I squeaked.

“Yeah,” said Ondrea. “He could tell I was on to him, and he avoided me the whole day.”

“He’s got to be stopped,” I said. “Listen. Ondrea. I’m gonna stop him.”

“Yes, Davy!” she cooed. “My hero.”

*

I flew to San Francisco. It was November, and I could walk again, sort of, but only short distances and with great pain. My mission was twofold—visit Sarah and beg her to come home with me to Michigan, and confront Lon Hackney and dump a bottle of pee on his head. That was my actual plan—to dump pee on his head, and let him know that I was doing it in the name of all the writers he’d ever fucked over.

I’d thought I would surprise Sarah, but when I called to tell her I was in the Bay Area for a week, she told me she was camping with Ghostshrimp in the Redwoods and wouldn’t be back for five days. While I waited for her to return, I turned my focus to stalking Lon Hackney. His office was just a few blocks from my friend Eli’s apartment in the Lower Mission, where I was staying. I shuffled my way over around three in the morning after a long night with Eli at the Peacock Bar, just to scout things out.

The headquarters of the Times Square Literary Agency (and Lon’s entire trick deck of business ventures) were housed, I discovered, in a single dingy office among a block of six others above a liquor store and a tanning salon. A flight of exposed concrete steps led upstairs from the parking lot to an outdoor T-shaped corridor, with a row of office doors on either side, numbered with faded stickers from a hardware store. I found Suite #4. After all those months of sending flat-rate boxes to the address on Mission Street, it was a rush to actually be there, outside the door where my pee bottles had been delivered. The shades were drawn, and for all I knew nobody had been there in months, though a handwritten label remained affixed to the mail slot that said:
LH LITERARY SERVICES/FUTURE IS NOW
—Lon’s umbrella groups. The mail slot’s inside duct kept me from spying into the room, but I was able to peek down at the floor, where a mid-sized pile of manila envelopes and bubble-wrapped packages lay spread on the worn carpet, like a Christmas haul prepped by elves from Staples. I could read a few of the return addresses—Guymon, Oklahoma; Key West, Florida; Regina, Saskatchewan—enough to confirm the reach of Lon’s operation. It was late, I’d had plenty to drink, and I had to pee, but had no bottle to piss in. I looked around to make sure I was alone, unzipped, and peed straight onto the door of Lon’s office—one of the most enormously pleasing whizzes I’d ever taken. Then I headed back to Eli’s place.

Over the next few days, I visited Lon’s offices a dozen times, hoping to cross paths with him. In a plastic bag, I carried three bottles of pee in Vitamin Water bottles in case we met face-to-face. I tried to imagine how he might respond as I doused him—would he run? Would he fight? But as the days passed with no sign of him, I began to fear that his office visits were few and far between. Maybe he’d glimpsed me from the parking lot, lingering outside his office door, and had known to stay away. Mail accumulated on the floor of his office. My pee bottles were too big to fit through the mail slot, but one night I left one wedged between the knob of his office door and the door jamb, and another balanced atop it. It was one thing for him to receive pee bottles in the mail—deranged threats shipped from the Midwest—but it gave me an evil thrill to picture him arriving at his office and finding my bottles waiting for him, creepy as tarantulas, announcing my arrival in California.

When I showed up the next morning, I saw that the bottles were gone, and my heart flim-flammed at the idea that he’d returned to his post, and was in there, on the other side of the door. But his office was dark, and through the mail slot, I saw that all the packages were still heaped on the floor. Most likely, the bottles had been chucked out by the old Bangladeshi woman who owned the building and ran the liquor store below, or her teenage grandson, who halfheartedly swept the parking lot every day at dawn and at dusk. I’d asked them one afternoon about Lon, telling them he was an old friend I was trying to get in touch with, but they’d noticed me skulking about gimpily the past few days and seemed to sense my darker intentions. After conferring in Bengali, the grandson turned back to me and said, “Sorry, boss, we don’t see him much. But I got you a case of those Orange Mango Nantucket Nectars you were asking about.”

Sarah returned from her camping trip and called me, and we made plans to hang out the next day. “What do you want to do?” she said. “Go to bookstores? See a movie? You ever been to the Cartoon Art Museum?”

“I need your help,” I told her. “It’s a stakeout.”

Sarah brought disguises—a tiger mask for her, glasses-with-giant-nose-and-bushy-mustache for me. We sat for hours on a pair of overturned buckets in the alleyway beside the liquor store, within sight of the cement steps from the parking lot to the offices upstairs. Anytime someone disappeared up the steps, Sarah raced over, tiptoed after them, then emerged a minute later, shaking her head: “Not our guy.” We played Go Fish, worked on Word Search puzzles from a gigantic book, filled out Mad Libs, and munched wasabi nuts, while I drank mango juice and a half pint of R & R whiskey, and Sarah sipped a jug of chocolate milk through a tiny straw. I was still in love with her, and told her so plenty of times over the course of the afternoon, and she found ways to politely deflect my advances without making me feel too crummy. She even tolerated me squeezing her knee, kissing her ears, and resting my head on her shoulder. “Come back to Michigan,” I said, my voice crackling with emotion. “Let’s just try this one more time. Come home, Sarah.”

She jumped to her feet. “Did you see that? The mailman! He’ll know something.” She dashed across the alley and up the stairs. I waited, hunched on my bucket, swirled in the hot shrieks and honks of rush-hour traffic. When she came back, she told me what the mailman had said: he’d met Lon once or twice but almost never saw him in the office. Often, packages arrived that were too big to fit through the mail slot, and he’d leave them for Lon with the accountants in Suite #6. “I knocked on their door,” Sarah said. “I thought they might know when he’d be back. But they already left for the day.”

“You’re really not gonna come back home with me?” I asked her.

“I can’t,” she said. “I love you, but I’m happy out here, I’m happy with Ghostshrimp. We’ve got Keenan and Banksy”—their dogs—“we’ve got the apricot trees, we’ve got the Draweteria.” This was their daily art project where Ghostshrimp whipped up illustrations and Sarah colored them in; they sold the results on his website, often for hundreds of dollars. “Don’t cry,” she said, putting her arms around me. “Everything’ll be okay.”