Pocket Kings (37 page)

(
Th
e Suburban Mimetic also played a few hands with History Babe, got her at a private table, and exchanged ten minutes of dirty talk with her. She told me, “Oh god oh god i am cumming now!” but I knew—in Vegas she had told me too much about her m.o.—that she wasn't in fact “cumming” but probably was slapping together a baloney and cheddar sandwich with her free hand.)

Th
ree days later Chip Zero was back. Artsy told me she'd missed me and that she'd been miserable without me. My duplicity had paid off.

(If poker has given me anything, other than esteem, self-confidence and a lot of money, it is a knowledge of bluffing and about how anybody will believe almost anything.)

Everything I was doing emboldened me to do more. Winning money at poker was my safety net and gave me the courage to flirt and possibly abscond for three weeks to London with APG.
Th
at in turn gave me the courage to take on the publishing world, which gave me the courage to win more money at poker. My onions, reader, were now the size of cannonballs.

And it was with those dangling cannonballs that I phoned an old acquaintance.

Martin Tilford: Frank Dixon? Good God! A blast from the past!

Me: Martin, how
are
you?

Martin Tilford: I'm good. You know, I have warm memories of meeting you back—

Me: Do they involve seared peppercorn tuna?

Martin Tilford: Heh-heh. You remember that. By the way, I should tell you—I read
Plague Boy
and enjoyed it immensely.

Me: What about the other book ?

Martin Tilford:
Th
e Horror of Love?
No, but it is on my list. Why are—

Me: Hey, Martin, things were very bad. Remember?

Martin Tilford:
Th
ings were bad? I'm sorry but I must be missing something here.

Me:
Th
ings were very bad then but still we carried on. [Long silence.] You're not getting this, are you?
Th
ings
were
very bad. But still
we
carried on. We carried
on.

Martin Tilford: I don't know what you're implying. Uh, why are you calling, Frank?

Me:
Th
ings were very bad then but still we carried on.
Th
at was the first line of my book. Remember now? You liked the first line. You liked it a lot. And I was just wondering if maybe you'd want to publish it since, you know, it got off to such a great start. And if not, then maybe you'd like to take me out and this time I'd be allowed to order the burger that I wanted? Well? Martin?

He groaned, he sighed, he waited for me to continue; I didn't and he hung up on me.

(To really rub it in, for the next four business days I called the still-extant Café Quelquechose and had seared peppercorn tuna delivered to him. I stopped when I realized that I might not be torturing him with this and that he was probably eating it.)

A few days before Christmas I e-mailed Greg Nolan, my editor at Norwich Cairn Books, my U.K. publisher, whom I'd met several times. When I told him I'd be in London in February and had a new book I was shopping around, he suggested we do lunch and asked me why Clint had not sent him the manuscript; when I e-mailed him back telling him I was going it alone now, he told me that he felt he couldn't read the book unless Clint sent it to him; when I e-mailed him back saying that while this was fair to Clint it wasn't fair to me, the book's author, he told me to contact Clint's foreign sales representatives in London—maybe if they read the book and liked it, he would read it—and I remembered then that even though my books had gotten good reviews in England, they had not sold terribly well there either; when I e-mailed him saying, “Okay, does this mean we won't do lunch?” he told me, “Of course we will!” He told me he would try to set up a reading at some local venue. For some unknowable reason I told him to go ahead and set it up.

Greg Nolan had taken a page out of Ross Carpenter's book. No, it wasn't Ross's book—it was Franz Kafka's. I soon found out that the people who handled foreign sales for the Reno Brothers would not read
Dead on Arrival
either, not unless Clint submitted it to them.
Th
e prospect that I would become the first American author to win the Booker Prize (and that this in turn would get the book published in the U.S. and that all the publishers who rejected me would be humiliated) was starting to look quite bleak, and no longer was the irony of my book's title merely dawning upon me; now it was a rusty spike getting driven into my skull.

If Glenn Tyler was my Abraham and Sarah, then Clint Reno was my Adam and Eve.

It was his turn to pay now.

I created a purposely sloppy letterhead for a scruffy unbathed hipster named Joseph Kaye and made up a fictitious address for him in the once edgy Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I faxed a letter to the Reno Brothers and told Clint that I (Joey) was a twenty-five-year-old Yale grad who'd just undergone a rigorous five-week ordeal at the Babbo Writers Workshop and emerged one of the cream of the crop. I told him that my short stories had been printed in many alternative publications and on literary Web sites . . . and then I proceeded to make them all up: Swordshares, iLit, FUNKtional Illiterate Press, subfuscus.com, the Anti-Antioch Review, whipster.org, alternationation.com, literalorgasm.net, and so on. Would you, I queried, like to take a look at the 310-page work of fiction I'd just finished, which was “dickens meets pynchon meets 50 cent”? Fearing he might try to contact Joey K., I told him to ignore the letterhead information: I no longer lived in “Billyburg” but now lived in (the much more edgy) Greenpoint and would contact him.

I called the office a few days later and it was so easy to get through to him that it broke my heart. Courtney Bellkamp simply put hipster Joey on hold and then ten seconds later, Clint Reno picked up. Not so long ago, it had been that easy for me, too.

Putting on my best garbled Eddie Vedder voice, I (Joseph Kaye) told Clint what my new book was about (“sexually-racially-artistically confused hip-hop fuck-up torn between white boy ivy-league shit and hard-core rap underbelly, and it's sort of man's inhumanity to himself?”) and how I'd won this and that minor literary prize (“and the total amount,” I said, “of all the prizes came to about forty-five dollars?”), and Clint was very polite and interested. “Sure,” he said, “e-mail it to me.” He then asked me if I had been in touch with any other agents and I—truthfully—told him that I had not, that he was my first choice. “I was looking for an agent,” I mumbled in all lower-case Vedderese, “And I read that you represent Frank W. Dixon, whose work I like really admire?”

“Yes, yes . . . I do.”

Rat bastard sack of steaming, two-week-old, maggot-infested cowshit.

“And the weirdest thing . . .” Joey K. said, “is I think I saw you a few weeks ago on Spring Street talking to him?”

“Yes,” he said, “I did run into Frank.”

“He had doughnuts? And he dropped the box?”

“Yep, that was him.”

“Okay, I'll e-mail the novel soon. . . . I just need to kinda like punctuate and uppercase it and whatnot.”

Lying rat bastard. I
knew
it was him and not Vance!

But two weeks later I e-mailed him:

rmmbr me? yale babbo anti-antioch williamsburg greenpoint subfuscus? long story short i signed w/other agency. the carpenter group? their interest was genuine, solid, enthusiastic. the book was sold. $350,000, which is about $349,999 more than I thought i'd get. it drops in april. movie deal also done. $1,900,000. sorry, dude. maybe next book? peace.

joey k.

On Christmas Day, right after we opened our presents, I told Wifey of my plan to go to London alone for three weeks and work nonstop on the
American Nightmare
Trilogy.
I was going to throw myself into this, I told her; every second of every day was going to be about writing and I was going to tap every creative cell and tissue in my body even if I had to turn myself inside out. “You don't want to be there,” I warned her. “It could possibly get very ugly.” I said that after this nonvacation vacation, I would definitely need a rest and threw out Tahiti as a possibility. As I'd suspected it would, her face lit up when she heard that and she told me she would think about it.

“I hope this is okay,” I said.
Th
e floor was covered with wrapping paper, opened boxes, mink-lined leather gloves, and a new pair of size six Jimmy Choos, and Celine Dion was wailing “Oh Holy Night” and the only thing glistening brighter than Cynthia's green eyes was the electric Baby Jesus teetering on His side on the treetop.

“No, it's okay,” she said. “Tahiti sounds great!”

I knew she'd see it that way.

I was so touched by her excitement and her urge to be with me that I wanted to drop London and head to Tahiti with her that night.

“So where will you be staying?” she asked.

Now, thanks to poker, I could afford an expensive hotel in London. But I didn't want her to know where I would be, just in case she decided to pull the surprise of a lifetime and drop in on me (and Artsy). Also, as unbelievable as this may sound, I wanted a place where I couldn't get access the Internet so easily . . . or at all. For not only would I be there with Artsy but I really was going to London to write. To ensure this, I decided I wasn't going to bring my laptop, which had become such an integral part of me that it was like leaving my liver at home. I would just bring pens and pads and the
Trilogy.

I'd be kicking it Old School.

“I was thinking of the Connaught,” I answered. “It's a very writerly place.”

Th
e next day I called a respectable three-star hotel off Brompton Road in Knightsbridge. It certainly wasn't the Connaught but it wasn't a youth hostel either.

“Do the rooms have free broadband access?” I asked the reservations clerk on the phone.

“No, sir, I'm afraid we don't.”

“Well, how much would it cost per day?”

“Sir, I'm afraid this hotel does not have it. We do have modem ports though.
Th
ey're rather dreadfully slow.”

“Perfect. I'll take it.”

I booked a single room for one week, then a double room for me and APG for two weeks.
Th
ree weeks. No laptop. No poker. A huge part of me would be dead. For a while. In the pit of my stomach I felt Dostoyevsky's firing squad line up and take aim.

“I'm not going to bring my laptop either,” Artsy e-mailed me the day after Christmas.

(Although holidays drastically reduce the number of people who play poker online, there still can be found plenty of sorry losers playing on Christmas Day,
Th
anksgiving, Yom Kippur, New Years Day. I had noticed this because I was one of them.)

After I booked a flight that left for London on February 15th I unleashed the second wave of my attack; fifteen more editors and agents got e-mails from me. Of those fifteen, only five wanted to read
DOA,
and of those five, three told me it just wasn't right for them; the remaining two never returned my e-mails or calls. I didn't understand that: couldn't they even write me one single sentence telling me they hated it? Wasn't rejecting people—people who'd spent years writing their books—and reducing them to tears one of the grand perks of the job?!

Years ago, after writing the first three hundred pages of Book 2 of the
Trilogy,
my flight from London back to New York was an hour in the air when I realized—panicking out of my wits—that I'd accidentally left my carry-on bag, with the five legal pads it was written on, on the security conveyor belt back at Heathrow. But it didn't matter. Back in New York I sat down, tuned in, and hammered it out of me, every page and every word, right into my Commodore Amiga. Two months later British Airways returned my carry-on bag to me: there inside were my five legal-size pads, as well as some unused Durexes. Comparing what I'd written in London to what I'd tried to remember, I saw that they were virtually identical. Absolute magic.