Pocket Kings (38 page)

So I wasn't worried when I could not find, despite turning my apartment upside down, the keys to the storage closet where all my past writings were kept. Yes, I could go to the storage facility and show them my driver's license and prove that I was really me, but I knew that once I wrote the words “
Th
ings were very bad then but still we carried on,” the rest would pour out of me like blood spurting out of a severed artery. (If Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in a labor camp could commit to memory entire novels that he hadn't ever typed, then I could do the same to novels I
had
typed
not
in a labor camp.) It would be just as it was the first time: I'd sit down at the library, take out my pad and pen, and let it flow. And I'd hone and polish it as it came back to me. Just as Michelangelo said that within a hunk of marble there was a statue waiting to be carved out, on the empty lines of those yellow pads lived my masterpiece, waiting, in Van Morrison's lovely words, to be born again.

“I'm with you in London now,” Artsy IM'ed me a few days before my flight. “We're in our hotel room and it's cold outside but my head is on your chest and we're damp and naked. Far from the madding crowd, baby, we are with each other at last. At last.”

Soon we would be eating food cooked by Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay and walking arm in arm down Regent Street, loaded down with shopping bags, the smoke on our breath entwining in the air. I had seen her in a bathing suit at the Nirvana and soon I would see her all bundled up in a shearling, scarf, and fur hat, and I'd see her in nothing at all.

A few days before my flight I was playing poker and winning a lot, trouncing everyone—it was the day I went over $320,000 (only $80K more to go before I'd stop playing for good)—when my
Love: A Horror Story
Amazon ranking flashed in front of me. I had gone, I saw, over the one-million mark. Not a million books sold, but somehow there where 1,000,251 books higher ranked than mine.

Who knew that so many books had ever been written? But they had been, and they were all kicking my book's ass.

Th
en I saw I had a new e-mail. I didn't recognize the sender's e-mail address at first—[email protected]—but a few seconds later it came back to me: Jim Tallman, Bedlington House Books. Bedlington was a boutique publishing house (that is, they paid their authors very little, nobody who worked there made much money, and hardly anybody read the books they published) and I'd sent him three queries about six weeks before. When he didn't reply I'd called him and gotten him on the phone and listened to him squirm while I asked why he hadn't replied. “Okay!” he caved. “I'll read your book!” I e-mailed him
DOA
a minute after that
,
and then he never got back to me. No longer the shy, retiring, pussyfooting type, I began sending him e-mail. “So?” went the first one. “Read it yet?” went the second. “Well, did you finish it and if so, what are your thoughts?” was the third. “Come on!” one of the last ones said. “Talk to me, Jimbo!”

I opened up his e-mail now and tried to make sense of it.

Toby:

Can't believe you ever actually worked with that pest. In a word: UGH.

Jim

P.S.: I'll let you know when I'm free. It's busy here.

I scrolled down to the e-mail from Toby Kwimper to Jim that Jim
thought
he was replying to.

Jim:

If I were you I'd just e-mail him back a nice brief note saying that the book wasn't for you. After that, you could relocate to a city far away and change your name and profession. BTW, you're not the only one. At least three other editors have told me about his irritating behavior in the last few weeks.

Toby

P.S. Yes, a lunch is in order. Just tell me where and when.

It made sense now. Jim Tallman was looking to Toby Kwimper, my former editor, for counsel. Below Toby's e-mail was Jim's initial e-mail to him about me, which had started it all.

Toby:

Toby, hello. I'm writing you because I'm in a bit of a predicament. Frank W. Dixon has badgered and harangued and begged and beaten me into submission so that I'll read his new novel. I don't know if you are good friends with him or not but, frankly, he made a massive nuisance of himself.

I cannot read the novel. I gave it to my assistant but she said she was so turned off by the first ten pages that it viscerally upset her.

He keeps e-mailing. He seems like someone who longs to hear the word NO, but I just do not want to be the one to do it.

HELP! and let's have lunch sometime.

Jim Tallman

Bedlington House Books

Jim thought he was replying to Toby but he had the thought of me—the pest, the irritant, the massive nuisance—so much on his mind that he'd sent it to me instead.

Th
at correspondence hurt but not as much as it should have. I don't remember the exact date, but a long time ago I gave up on being loved by everyone.

I didn't mind being a private nuisance, and I certainly didn't mind viscerally upsetting anyone, but one day I discovered I was also a public nuisance. I was scrolling down through gawker.com one day when I came across:

Don't you just hate it when you haven't written the Great American Novel but you think you have? Doesn't it disgust you when your first book gets a lot of undeserved publicity but doesn't sell and then your next book gets even less publicity and sells—oh, at last count, what was it—zero copies? What to do? You write a third book and when even your own agent shreds it, you shop it around yourself. We kind of like it that you harass every tweedy, bespectacled, martini-swilling, self-loathing editor on Grub Street. God knows, they have it coming. But now they're getting so riled up . . .

continue reading »

I didn't continue reading. I was humiliated, I had brought it on myself, I had it coming, but that didn't make it any better, and besides, all those editors deserved what they got, too.

My jihad was over.
Th
e original idea, years ago, had been to establish a reputation with three minor books, then get the
American Nightmare
Trilogy
published. Now I was going to turn that on its head.
Th
e
Trilogy
would get
Dead on Arrival
published and the rest would be history. I wouldn't harass any editors anymore. Not for a while at least.

Now I knew what it was like to be a door-to-door vacuum salesman, the guy that barges in, dumps a handful of dust on the floor, then sucks it all up and makes the sale to the housewife. But I was selling myself and it hadn't worked. No, I wasn't the vacuum salesman, I wasn't the vacuum. I was the dust.

On the morning of February 15, I kissed Cynthia good-bye when she left for work. She wished me luck, told me to call often. I told her I would . . . though I didn't let on I'd be calling just to make sure she was in New York and not in London.

When we parted, once again I felt all the warmth sucked out of me at once.

I spent the rest of the day—never taking a break—playing poker. It was like an alcoholic going on a binge the day before checking himself into rehab. I lost, lost some more, lost more than that, climbed back up, struggled and fought and wound up $10 ahead. Ten hours for ten dollars—a mockery of the minimum wage.
Th
e walls of my apartment faded out, I wasn't really sitting on a chair at a desk in the Western Hemisphere on Planet Earth . . . I was light-years away, floating semi-comatose in an opalescent nebula of real-time gambling space.

I had to be at the airport in two hours and decided to eavesdrop.

I saw History Babe and Wolverine Mommy and Second Gunman at a table yukking it up. Cookie joined them and played a bit.
Th
en Hist left and got a private table with Hands Brinker and he told her how much he wanted to lick her all over. I saw Bjorn 2 Win win four grand from a table full of irate Spaniards. Bjorn was, of course, a sore loser but an even worse winner and really rubbed it in. “I hate this game,” one of the Spaniards said, “but I hate you even more,
puta!
” A few minutes later I saw Kiss My Ace and Boca Barbie talking in cutesy little poems to each other. It was like watching two kids feeding each other cotton candy.

In ten minutes the Town Car would be downstairs, ready to whisk me away to JFK Airport and to London, to the small library in Kensington where the Muses would sing to me and I could pour out all my soul's honey and fire, and into the arms of Artsy Painter Gal.

I was just about to leave when I came upon Pest Control and Bubbly Brit Bird.

Pest Control:
oh god no. i wasn't ignoring you! i wasn't.

Bubbly Brit Bird:
well? please. talk 2 me. what's wrong then?

Pest Control:
it's not good. i'm haven't been home for a few weeks, georgy. not good.

Bubbly Brit Bird:
where are you then?

Pest Control:
in hospital. and i'm not getting out.

Bubbly Brit Bird:
oh god, i'm sorry, phil. my sweet philly.

Pest Control:
emphysema. very very bad. i'm on oxygen. a tube most of the time into my throat but it's no use, georgy. it's very bad.

Bubbly Brit Bird:
why didn't you tell me this? you know how much I care about you. all the times I couldn't find you here i thought you wuz avoiding me.

Pest Control:
i just didn't want you to know. don't want u 2 feel sorry 4 me.

Bubbly Brit Bird:
but i care! oh, i feel so bad for you, philly. are you in pain now?

Pest Control:
pls don't feel bad for me. i've had good life. and i got to know u at the end. you made me so very happy, okay? :-))) not much pain. just v. tough breathing.

Bubbly Brit Bird:
is there anything i can do? u have no idea how much u mean 2 me. i can fly over and see you. i know your wife is around but maybe you could sneak me in?? just for 1 sec? i want to see u!

Pest Control:
my sweet georgy. not enough time for that. not much time left at all.

Bubbly Brit Bird:
oh my phil. i miss you. i miss you. pls don't go.

Pest Control:
i'm sorry. i wasn't avoiding you. never would do that. just v. sick, that's all.

Bubbly Brit Bird:
pls, phil. tell me if there's anything I can do. anything at all.

Pest Control:
just play a few hands with me now. that's all i want. we'll play. okay?

14

Ice Cold

A
rriving in London on a cold and gusty Friday morning, I took a taxi to the unspectacular five-floor Royal Brompton Hotel where my drearily appointed room looked onto a narrow sidestreet on which stood an Indian restaurant, a fish and chips joint, a French bakery and launderette.

I permitted myself that day and the weekend to take in the city.
Th
e plan was: three days of tourist stuff; then five days of solid nonstop writing; then Artsy would arrive.

I stuck to my draconian diet, having only white rice for dinner the first night. During the day I walked about fifteen miles, all in a frigid wind. As I walked, small scraps and then whole sections of Book I of the
Trilogy
came back to me, word by word, paragraph by paragraph.

I didn't miss poker at all.

Saturday it got colder, but I went to three museums and ate a half a scone in the morning and more white rice at night. I was hungry but resisted the impulse to eat, even with the curry, croissant, and fish and chip aromas drifting in from across the street.
Th
e second day I walked nineteen miles and on Sunday I did it again. By evening my lips were chapped and my back and calves throbbed with an invigorating agony.

I would stop now and then at shops, cafés, etc. (Every once in a while an Internet café would pop up but I walked by; I didn't want to put myself in a situation where one click could bring me to a table.) All the bookstores, I'd noticed, had this one particular book in the windows; it was written by a writer I'd never heard of before, Gerald Waverly, and was called
Nuts.
I must have seen a hundred copies before it dawned on me I was looking at the same book each time. It had a picture of a hand of poker on the cover . . . yet even then I didn't think of poker.

By Sunday night I must have walked fifty miles, and I took a bath so hot I thought it might set off the hotel's sprinkler system. Was it my imagination or were my corduroy pants hanging looser?
Th
e last thing I saw before going to bed was the snow starting to fall, slashing down on the empty street and the awnings below.

I woke up Monday and trudged two miles through the falling snow and the two feet of already fallen snow to the library in Kensington.
Th
e whitened city was turning whiter, but I couldn't wait to sit down and get started, and it was if the decades had never passed and I'd been sitting in the library only the day before, forging my groundbreaking masterpiece.

CLOSED TODAY DUE TO BLIZZARD,
a sign on the library door said.

I began another long walk and bought a heavy-duty parka and tundra-strength winter boots on Oxford Street. At twilight the snow stopped falling, and the layer on the ground, with the light dying on it, turned toothpaste blue. Icicles formed on Westminster Abbey and the Victoria Albert Museum and by late evening the snow was dark gray. I stopped into an Internet café on King's Road, but not to play poker.
Th
ere was only one e-mail of note; it was Beverly Martin telling me to contact Susan Jessup, the young authoress who idolized me.

Th
at evening I called Greg Nolan of Norwich Cairn and left a message on his voicemail, asking him if he'd set up a reading for me and if so where and when.

On the way to the library the next morning I stopped into a bookshop that was just opening up. I picked up a copy of
Nuts: How I Bluffed, Deceived, Scammed, and Defrauded Strangers, Enemies and Very Good Friends and Lied to Just About Everybody and Won £2 Million Playing Poker.
Below the title was the phonetic pronunciation of the word “nuts” and three definitions—it was styled like a dictionary entry.
Th
e first definition read “in poker, the very best hand possible.”
Th
e second was “testicles, bollocks.”
Th
e third definition was one word only: “insane.” I read the jacket and discovered that this Gerald Waverly had written a “searing, scathing, scalding and hilarious” memoir about online poker. To protect his identity, his face was not revealed in the jacket photo: the tall stacks of pounds, euros, yen, and dollars in his hands cleverly concealed his face.

A few miles later, I turned onto Kensington High Street, which was bereft of its usual bustle. Sooty snow had already been plowed from the street and was piled onto the sidewalk. As I walked, I felt a sudden throe of extreme existential hollowness and stopped and examined myself in the ice-glazed window of a shoe store. I had on my backpack, gloves, sunglasses, and scarf. Something crucial was missing though. I resumed walking, feeling even more hollow than before, and realized what it was: my laptop. I was suffering from Phantom Limb Syndrome.

Th
e library was open.

I sat down at a table on the second floor, took out my pens and pads, and wrote the words “
Th
ings were very bad then but still we carried on.” I looked at it, crossed it out. Now, just because I'd begun the Troika that way so many years ago, why did it still have to begin the same way? I could write it another way—Martin Tilford be damned—so I wrote: “We still carried on then but . . .”

As I toyed around with rearranging the words, I noticed another table, the long side of which was flush against a wall.
Th
ere were computers on this table and library users were accessing the Internet. I swallowed and could almost hear cards shuffling and chips clattering and I felt like a coiled-up cobra hearing the first chirps of a snake charmer's flute.

I was writing “
Th
en things were very bad but . . .” (and thinking of “Ishmael, call me.”) when my cell phone buzzed: it was, I saw, someone from Norwich Cairn. I couldn't take the call in the library, so I put my coat on, went outside—it was snowing again—and played the message.

“Hello, Frank, this is Penelope Something calling from Norwich Cairn. Yes, you're on for a reading. Be at the Leaky Crank Pub at eight o'clock
Th
ursday night. It's a very nice venue. Ask for Nigel Somebody and he'll tell you what to do. We put a rather large advert in
Th
e Pavement
newspaper last week. Also, Greg had to leave town at the last moment to attend the Odense Book Fair for a fortnight and I'm afraid he can't have lunch with you. Cheers.”

A reading.
Th
ursday night. My first reading ever. Gulp.

Back in the library I began to wonder which book I should read from at the Leaky Crank.
Th
ere was the funny, poignant London chapter from
Plague,
but the locals might be offended when ill Londoners began dropping like flies.
Th
ere was any section of
Love,
but that book died a quiet death in the stores and might die a second, much louder death aloud. When I started shuffling, in my mind, through the pages of
Dead on Arrival,
I nearly shot out of my chair when I realized:
Holy shit, I don't have a book to read from!!!

I stuffed my pads and pens back into my backpack and flew down the stairs and ran out the door. Into the snow to head east, where all the bookstores were.

As I walked through the biting wind, I worked out the time frame: if I called Cynthia and she sent a book to me via FedEx it probably wouldn't get to London in time. I went to every single bookshop on the way, and when I got to Charing Cross Road I hit every bookstore there, too.

At Foyle's Bookshop I told a man behind the counter, “Look, I'm desperate here. I need to get a copy of any book by the American author Frank Dixon as soon as possible.”

He returned two minutes later triumphantly bearing
Th
e Shore Road Mystery
and
Th
e Mark on the Door,
and I told him that I was interested in the other Frank W. Dixon, whereupon he handed me a little pink form and I filled in the name of the books I wanted and the author's name.
Th
en I had to fill in my own name and phone number. It was embarrassing to me that Frank Dixon was this desperate to read the complete works of Frank Dixon so I jotted down the name Lonnie Beale.

“Can you get this to me no later than tomorrow afternoon?” I asked.

“We will do what we can,” he promised me unpromisingly.

My pink form was spiked on top of forty others, and it occurred to me that they might do what they can but they were also doing it for dozens of other people and I didn't stand a chance.

I walked up to Bloomsbury, all the while afraid my eyelids were going to freeze open, to the Regent's Park area, then east to Clerkenwell, where a good portion of Book 2 of the
American Nightmare Trilogy
takes place and where I could find no bookstore.

I stopped inside another Internet café somewhere and went online, hoping that some insane fan of mine had posted a chapter or two of
Love.
Th
ere were no chapters and, I was quickly reminded, there were no fans either.

I logged on to the Galaxy and found Boca Barbie at a table. “Hey, Chip,” she asked me, “have you seen Kiss around today?” I told her I hadn't played poker for a while and she said: :). A few minutes later APG and I were at a private table. I didn't play. “I thought you weren't bringing a laptop!” she said and I explained my whereabouts and why.

I told her that I had a reading and she told me how proud she was of me. When I asked her if she was still coming she said and I quote: “I'm with you already, Chip, and our bodies are spent and raw and we cannot tear ourselves apart from each other. We're animals!”

I called home that night and told Wifey, who was at work, my predicament.

“So where were you,” she asked, “when it occurred to you that you didn't have a book?”

“In the library. Why?”

“
Where
were you again, Frankie?”

“In a library.” A library!

Just to be safe I gave her the hotel's fax number and told her to fax Chapter 13 of
Plague
and any ten pages of
Love
. “I'm on it!” she said, eager to help.

Th
e following day I would visit every library in London. If that didn't work, maybe Foyle's would come up with a copy. I looked out the window and saw snow pouring down again. I couldn't see anything but snow, and this time it didn't look like it was going to stop.

Th
e next day the libraries were closed again: London had gotten pelted by fifteen more inches of snow and it was eight degrees out. Cars were buried within bone-white monoliths of powder; buses and the tube weren't running. Stiff Upper Lip City's lips had frozen stiff.

True to her word, Cynthia faxed me what I'd requested. But it hadn't come through properly.
Th
e pages were smeared and black and the man at the front desk told me the hotel's fax machine had been having problems “for quite some time now.”

When I left the hotel the next day I thought:
I could just recite the first chapter of the
Trilogy
by heart . . . if it comes to that.
I knew I could pull it off.

My first stop was the Kensington library. A librarian told me they did have
Plague
but it was out presently on loan. “Do you have
Love: A Horror Story
?” I asked her. She checked and said no. I asked her when
Plague
was due back and she said a week ago. I asked her for a list of every library in central London and quickly got one. When I walked out of the building each and every snowflake looked like typewriter letters falling around me . . . they converged in the air to form the words of Book 1 of the
Trilogy
and I was being deluged in slo-mo by sentences, paragraphs and chapters.

I lumbered over to Foyle's—in vain I tried every library en route—and a different but very similar man there told me they hadn't gotten around to my request yet. “I need that book,” I said, “in any way, shape, or form that you can get it.”
Th
e spike had tripled with pink slips, I saw. “Please,” I said, offering him twenty quid, “can you put my request on the top?”