Slot Attendant

by Jack Engelhard

  “Aha.”

  “Look, you can’t imagine how disappointed I was. I was insulted. I’ve never gone that low. It’s a real insult.”

  “I imagine…”

  “Yeah, I’m hurt. But who knows? Once the book gets out there, you know, book signings, TV…”

  Will Roe Morgan be paying for my travels?

  “That’s the other thing. No.”

  So that’s what it is. The same No Thanks – but with honey. But I cannot refuse, not so fast. There is an offer on the table, and it has been six years, 84 days without taking a fish. Obviously, I am the side deal. Roe Morgan wants that other writer, and I am the toss in. Never mind. There is an offer on the table and that is something. Is that something to celebrate? I’m not sure.

  “There’s another thing. He wants a couple of changes.”

  “He wants a yarn, right?”

  “We don’t want to lose this, do we?”

  I’m thinking. I’m thinking.

  “So what do you say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can start drawing up the contract.”

  I’m still thinking.

  “So?”

  “I’ll have to give this some thought, Sylvio.”

  “Really?”

  I tell him that this offer – is this an offer? – is not exactly a life-changing bonanza.

  “I tried,” Sylvio says. “He wouldn’t even go for six thousand.”

  Wouldn’t even go for six thousand, the bastard. Hah!

  “Let me think it over.”

  He walks me to the door, a move he’s never made before.

  “You’ve got a terrific novel there,” he says. “They just haven’t caught up to you yet. Don’t despair.”

  Chapter 20

  Melanie already knows. She’s waiting for me at the Mount Laurel bus station. There was no phone call from New York to get reservations started at the Steak House. So she knows. There will be no celebrating. It’s back to one dress at a time, and hold that party in Haddonfield. Nothing’s changed. It’s back to everything.

  Slowly, back in the house, I give her the whole story.

  “It isn’t fair,” she says.

  Then we drive over to McDonald’s. I’ve said it all and there is nothing more to talk about.

  “It isn’t fair,” she says now at McDonald’s.

  That evening I’m back in my green uniform. She drives to the Lindenwold train station. I’m off to work, as a slot attendant. She had called in sick for me, just in case there’d be celebrating. But I am not sick. So I called back that I’d be late, but I’ll be in. That was Omar who took my call. Roger Price is gone, taken in for surgery. Who knows if he’ll ever be back.

  Melanie and I are sitting here waiting for the Atlantic City train. It’s late. No, we agree, that’s no deal. That’s a slap in the face. That’s Roe Morgan. After all this time, it’s still Roe Morgan. We won’t give up, though. No we won’t. We will not give up. There are other agents, other publishers. Anyway, Sylvio isn’t strong on fiction. I’ll use him if I ever write a book on golf.

  “There’s more out there,” says Melanie. “We’ll just keep knocking.”

  A review she wrote a month ago so pleased the writer that he sent her a thank you, as did the publisher. Yes, the publisher. So maybe here’s a contact.

  “So we’re agreed.”

  “Of course,” says Melanie. “That’s no offer. It’s a joke.”

  So, some satisfaction. I will call Sylvio next day to pass this message to Roe Morgan: No Thanks.

  That’s something.

  But what about that other deal, that offer from the casino, Shelly King and Bob Foster?

  Yes, Jay Leonard, Celebrity Greeter, Celebrity Author. Next, visit our cage of midgets and giants.

  “We have to think about that,” says Melanie, now getting very practical.

  I assure her I will, I will think about that, and she assures me that something big will come along from New York or Hollywood, as these things always happen when you’re not watching, when you least expect it, so for the time being, yes, this is something to consider, something to keep us going until our luck changes.

  “For the better,” I caution.

  Don’t tempt fate.

  “For the better,” she says.

  She reminds me of my motto: Back class is always dangerous.

  I’ve done it before, big time. I will do it again.

  We’re actually quite elated. Who knows? Anything can still happen. It’s impossible to believe that nothing will happen. Yes, there is that publisher that thanked her. This could be a contact. So we’re elated, glad to have gotten this over with; start fresh. Starting tomorrow, start fresh. We’ve taken the blow and absorbing and recovering and we’re even planning. We’re even dreaming again.

  For my part, I am near euphoric. I am back to rock bottom, and that’s a powerful spot to be in. Nothing to lose. Yes, when you’re weak, you’re strong. So I am near euphoric.

  But there is something else. There was some phone call while I was gone, from one of those investigators at the casino. Yes, Franco’s death was ruled a suicide, but they’re thinking of reopening the case. There are questions. Apparently, further probing showed that Franco’s Mazda had no brakes. Could be neglect on his part, or tampering. No wonder he crashed through the eighth floor wall.

  Do I have anything to do with this? Toledo? Toledo and me together?

  “Is this going to be something?” she says, nervously. “Is this something I should worry about?”

  But then the train pulls up. I kiss her and tell her I love her. I do. I love her more than anything. We hug as if it’s final. But it isn’t. We have dreams. Something has got to give. Emerson again. “To be great is to be misunderstood.” Maybe I’m not so great, but I am misunderstood. But that is bound to change. Yes, I will go on. I step out of the car, walk up to the platform and into the train. I wave to her from the window. She waves back and blows me a kiss. I miss her already. I always do.

  I am off to work. I am a slot attendant.

  More Bonus Essays by

  Jack Engelhard

  1: Salinger Is Back and PBS Has Got Him

  2: In Praise of Jeff Bezos

  3: Hemingway and A Lost Generation

  4: Casino “Eye in the Sky” Knew You Before NSA

  5: Me and Esther Williams

  6: On Writing A Novel in Six Weeks

  7: Don Imus to Frank Rich: Regrets for Butchering Broadway?

  8: Dear Writers: Suppose Your Novel Sucks?

  9: JFK, Marilyn, Elvis: Trashing the Dead with Books

  10: Adultery, Anyone?

  11: Salinger, Roth Hemingway and the Wilderness of Writing

  12: Tips for Becoming A Better Writer from A Writer

  13: The Obit Uris Never Got

  Salinger Is Back and PBS Has Got Him

  NEW YORK, August 27, 2013 – The theme of despair runs throughout literary and even biblical history. So J.D. Salinger, who excelled in writing about the melancholy of human existence, mainly so in The Catcher in the Rye, was not the first to approach the topic of futility.

  Raised as a rich kid in Manhattan, something changed when he returned from serving heroically in World War II. Was it all of it or was it mostly Dachau? We can argue that after that singular experience he came back a Holocaust survivor, and as such we will never know what he knew and we will never know what he saw – except what he told his daughter, that the smell of burnt flesh never leaves your nostrils.

  Salinger left us in self-imposed silence some three years ago at age 91, but he still manages to make headlines. A new Weinstein Company production of Salinger will be distributed to 200 theaters Sept 6 in advance of a PBS documentary set for January. The accompanying biography, written by dubious experts David Shields and Shane Salerno (“slapdash,” according to The New York Times) is to emerge in print September 3.

  The buzz has it that Salinger wasn’t done. More Salinger books are coming
one of these days, but never too soon for Salinger buffs. Apparently, if the reports are accurate, Holden Caulfield and members of the Glass family will be with us again, updated and refreshed. If the reports are inaccurate, this won’t be the first time high hopes were dashed.

  As for this Salinger devotee, no biography on Salinger says it better than Kenneth Slawenski, who, it appears, holds to the opinion “not so fast” about a Salinger Second Coming. Slawenski’s biography is still the authoritative word on Salinger and his chapters on Salinger’s wartime exploits can perhaps be duplicated, never surpassed.

  But what is it about Salinger that so fascinates us? We never stopped bothering him when he was alive and when dead we will not let him rest in peace.

  He wrote those novellas and those short stories – all of it first-rate American literature – and then only one full-length novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

  Repeatedly we are told that Catcher is about “adolescent angst.” Really? Is that why, published in 1951, the book still sells around a million copies a year?

  There must be something else, something deeper that keeps us coming back and wanting more. I suggest that Salinger hit on the very thing that we would rather not touch by that touches us all – despair. Remember, happiness is only a pursuit. Despair comes without an invitation and we all know the feeling. This is the truth Salinger had the guts to reveal. He may have couched it in teenage lingo, but The Catcher in the Rye can be read and appreciated at any age.

  Stylistically, Salinger was mostly on his own, but owes much gratitude to Mark Twain and Walt Whitman and others who articulated American vernacular.

  Onto the depth of despair, here Salinger had tradition on which to rely.

  In Ecclesiastes, King Solomon was the first to awaken us to human frailty and futility. What profit is there in all this toil when we all come to the same end? Rich or poor, the same end awaits us all, and from wisdom to foolishness, it is all the same at the time of reckoning.

  Centuries later Erasmus picked up the theme of futility, arguing in praise of folly, and in favor of foolishness above wisdom. It is the fool that gets it right.

  Tolstoy admired the “holy fool.”

  Later on we come to F. Scott Fitzgerald, mostly in The Crack-Up and Samuel Beckett, mostly in Waiting for Godot, who extend the thought that everything is useless.

  “I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” from Beckett’s Unnamable.

  No wonder Salinger turned to Eastern Religion to find some purpose, namely the Vedantic branch of Hinduism.

  Did he not know that Judaism is the original Eastern Religion?

  Maybe he found the purpose, after all, and that is what is hidden in that great big box that we all want opened. Did he find the secret?

  Hemingway never found the secret and by his own hand refused to go beyond 61 years.

  In his last years, Salinger’s search was a search for God, or simply godliness, a life of constant prayer. Did he not know that in Psalms King David is the father of prayer?

  The sages who codified the 24 Books of Hebrew Scriptures tried to suppress King Solomon’s Ecclesiastes, on the obvious notion that it was too pessimistic. They changed their minds and even declared that it was among the holiest books of all, because, despite harsh truth, it ends on a foundation of faith.

  In his quest, did Salinger find that moment of divine clarity? Is this our pursuit and what keeps us waiting and wanting more?

  In Praise of Jeff Bezos

  NEW YORK, August 9, 2013 – By now most people know that Jeff Bezos took a giant step into the world of journalism by purchasing the Washington Post, and nobody covers all the ramifications of such a bold move better than my colleague Rick Townley here. Townley offers an overview and an appraisal that, in my view, is right on.

  As a writer who was there nearly at the start, I may have something to add, and it is all good, good for Bezos, good for readers and very good for writers. That part, the part about writers, is seldom mentioned when talk gets around to Amazon, the online company that Bezos started back in 1995. A personal observation may be worthwhile, and it amounts to this:

  Jeff Bezos saved books as much as Johannes Gutenberg saved printing.

  Through Amazon, Bezos started off by selling just that, books. Today he sells everything under the sun, and nobody does it bigger or better.

  But on publishing and bookselling, there has been talk that Amazon trampled the competition. That is nonsense. Publishers began losing traction back in the 1980s through faults all their own when the big fish began swallowing the small fish. Today, on Publishers Row in Manhattan, where once there were thousands of different and varied imprints – today there are five.

  There are rumors that soon the Big Five will be whittled down further, to the Big Four. If you are a writer, good luck.

  As for bookstores, same thing. The shops-on-the-corner began disappearing before Amazon came along, all through mergers, acquisitions and consolidations.

  Amazon came in just in time. Millions of books that were destined to die, got sold. Thousands of writers out in the cold, got published.

  I got the call (actually an email) around 1996/97 asking if I would mind having my books (starting with Indecent Proposal) listed and for sale on Amazon. Are you kidding? Of course! But there was nothing so special about me. By the multitudes, writers from all over were invited to participate; their books listed and for sale.

  Where has this been all our lives?

  In those early years, Amazon introduced its Amazon Shorts program, where writers were urged to submit their short stories. In other words, if you wrote well enough, you were getting published – and what a new world was this for writers who had been teased and trifled by the big-time houses, and whose works were doomed from start to finish.

  Now writers had a home. This is a big thing! Writing is tough enough. Getting published can be brutal in a world so uncaring. Hundreds, soon to be thousands, participated. Digitally, this is where I met some first-rate writers, John W. Cassell and Linda Shelnutt to name just two. We exchanged our stories, shared opinions, and a big bad world got friendlier.

  A new universe of literature had opened up, and soon readers, actual readers, began buying our short stories and our books, digitally and in print.

  All that was unthinkable until Amazon came on the scene.

  Following the Shorts program, another new beginning – the Kindle. We know that readers love it, but writers love it even more, for Kindle offers another means to get published. No longer are writers at the mercy of the Big Five, whose doors always seem shut. Now writers can bypass the snobs and go directly to Kindle.

  Even big name writers, fed up with the slow and grinding process of mainstream publishing, have turned to Kindle. This includes Pulitzer Prize winning author David Mamet. He went straight to Kindle with his latest, as have many others. This is, after all, the digital age.

  Theologian Abraham Heschel provides a near perfect definition of a prophet. A prophet is a person “who knows what time it is.”

  Jeff Bezos is no prophet, okay. So what is his secret? He knew what time it was. The 21st Century.

  Hemingway and A Lost Generation

  NEW YORK, July 2, 2013 – In the end, the will to die was stronger than the will to live. On the morning of July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway aimed a double-barreled, 12-guage shotgun at his head, pulled the trigger and thus ended the short happy life of America’s most famous writer. He was 61 and we do not know what would-be books he took to his grave.

  Fittingly, he often spoke of the power of silence, or as biographer Kenneth Slawenski reminds us about J.D. Salinger, the secret to great writing resides in the “fire between the words.” On the temptation to write long, Hemingway remarked that there are times to resist and to “say no to a typewriter.”

  Was Hemingway a great writer? The greatest? That is an argument, so let us leave it at that, but without a doubt he was a prose stylist par excellence, even though his most beloved work, The Old Man and
the Sea, was more poetry than prose, and it earned him the 1954 Nobel Prize.

  He was the Babe Ruth of American literature. Often enough he did swat it out of the park. He was a boozer and a brawler but turned devotional when he sat down – or stood up – to write. Famed for that granite-like style, he claimed to have no style, only the blood, sweat and perseverance to cobble together the cleanest sentence possible. In virtually all his paragraphs there is a sense of urgency. This is also how he lived.

  Writers who came along during his heyday and those that followed owe him a debt. Only with trembling fingers did we dare type even page one in the shadow of Henry James and Herman Melville. Hemingway taught us to be unafraid. By example, he proved that saying it simple, straight and true is far more authoritative than razzle-dazzle.

  Thanks to his matter-of-fact articulation, we stopped being intimidated by the flowery prose of the past. If he could say it so plainly, so could we.

  Depart from embellishments, was his message, just tell it as it is – and this was the lesson he learned early on from the Kansas City Star. Later, he complained that journalism “blunts the instrument” for fiction, and yet all his novels and short stories show the hand of newspaper reporting, like this, from the opening of The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber:

  “It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.” (Italics added by author)

  Something did happen. So now we are drawn in, and in journalism that is a lede, or lead.

  On war, Hemingway’s novels do not match up against Tolstoy or James Jones. Sentence-by-sentence, however, Hemingway pioneered a unique American voice.

  Hemingway illustrated that simplicity, directness and repetitiveness, if done wisely and properly, can be powerful literary tools. Surely he learned some of that from Gertrude Stein, “rose is a rose is a rose,” but much of his rhythmic prose was biblically inspired, like this from King Solomon’s Ecclesiastes: