Pocket Kings

by Ted Heller

  Fifth Beetle: Always liked Julius Caesar. I was born on March 15, the day he was killed.

  Chip Zero: Wow, you must be over 2000 years old! You seem awfully spry for a man your age.

  Grouchy Old Man: You know, just for the Caesar salad alone, you gotta hand it to Julius.

  Chip Zero: The hell with the Caesar salad. I mean, what about the Orange Julius? And if you’re going to go by history and foodstuffs, what about the Napoleon?

  Grouchy Old Man: I guess if you’re a conqueror or something to that effect, you get a food named after you, huh?

  Chip Zero: It’s a good thing the Nazis lost or otherwise we’d be having little pastries called adolphs or himmlers or something.

  Meanwhile another hand was underway. I had two twos, usually a loser hand. But—and I had noticed this a few times by now—the other players were now more involved in our conversation than with their hands or with the money at stake. I kept up the inane chatter.

  Chip Zero: All right, History: Desert island? Ethelred the Unready or William Pitt the Elder?

  History Babe: Hmm. Can’t I just have Brad Pitt? I wouldn’t be Unready for him.

  Chip Zero: Grouchy, Betsy Ross or Marie Antoinette? Desert island?

  Grouchy Old Man: That’s a tough one.

  Chip Zero: Betsy could probably sew you a loincloth out of coconut hairs but Marie would probably give you much better head.

  I raised, they folded, and I won with only a pair of 2s. When all was said and done, I would’ve gotten beaten by Grouchy Old Man, who revealed he had two 9s, and by Wolverine Mommy, who was so busy LOLing that she hadn’t noticed she had 9s and 2s.

  I had developed an M.O.: keep ’em talking, keep ’em laughing, win their money.

  I was playing too much, I knew. But because I was winning, it wasn’t easy to stop.

  Plague got negative press before it was even finished. An article had run in Publishers Weekly about the purchase of the book; this was immediately pounced upon by a weasely media pundit (one of those parasites who spends all day writing about people who spend all day writing about people who spend all day writing about . . .), who, on a seldom-read and no longer extant website, called my novel “the lowest form of trash, the rankest kind of rubbish, the grossest sort of detritus, and worthless mind-polluting slag at its absolute worst.” Now, at this point, the book hadn’t even been set in type and I hadn’t yet earned a dime out of it. And already the reviews were negative? Two hundred years ago this would have been enough to challenge someone to a duel; those days are gone but nowadays, in place of pistols at forty feet, there is e-mail at fifty words a minute. I fired off a quick one and it was curtly responded to by the weasel. In the response he had the temerity to call me thin-skinned! The following day I found out where the Web site offices were (only five blocks away, as it happened) and stormed past a receptionist and confronted him in his office. I figured he’d be a 110-pound Ivy League twerp, and that the years of pent-up fury I had over him—plus my menacing Gérard Depardieu scowl— would be enough to make him piss his Old Navy chinos. He turned out to be tall, muscular, and well-dressed and could have knocked me out easily, but it didn’t matter. “You call me thin-skinned?!” I yelled at him. “How dare you?” His stunned coworkers rushed to his cubicle as I continued. “YOU DARE CALL ME THIN-SKINNED, YOU SNARKY GODDAM CHATTERING CLASS FUCK?! WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU FUCKIN’ ARE?!” Eventually my inner Teaneck, New Jersey, and I were asked to leave by the petite office manager, who said, just as the elevator doors opened for me, “You know, Mr. Dixon, you do sound a tad thin-skinned.”

  I had little knowledge of the book business before I was published, and now I have a lot less. Everybody seems so scared to do the wrong thing that they wind up doing nothing. I worked in the clothing business once, and in those days the Mafia was all over the place—they were at the airport clearing the goods through customs, in the trucks delivering the cartons from the airport to the warehouse, and delivering the goods to the stores. It was dirty and people were frightened, but at least you knew the rules. In publishing, everyone is governed by a sort of invisible, elastic British constitution that has never been written: nobody knows whether there are any rules but everyone pretends there are and that they know them.

  It is impossible for me to read “great” books anymore without seeing the ink of an editor’s blue pen throughout. When I pick up something like the nap-inducing The Ambassadors by Henry James, I see blue lines slashing through whole sentences and large blue Xs on paragraph after paragraph, page after page. The whale sections of Moby Dick are covered by huge blue Xs (today some astute publisher would just publish the whale parts and the book would wind up on the “Who Knew?” table in Barnes & Noble). I see written in the corner of the page in blue: “For God’s sake, GET ON WITH THE DAMNED STORY!” Honestly, would any cost-conscious editor today permit this extravagant waste of paper from Ulysses:

  “Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the . . .” and on and on until finally: “Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.”

  And yet . . . and yet . . . there are hideously pretentious and shockingly juvenile portions of Jonathan David Foster Safroenzthem’s Everything Motherless is Infinitely Heartbreaking and Corrected (which I have not read and which I will never read, but I have seen the reviews) that somehow made it into print, that some editor—thanks to a three-martini lunch?—okayed.

  (On the other hand, can you imagine the parts of these books that were left out?)

  One day, a few weeks before Plague Boy hit the stores, I got a phone call from Abigail Prentice, the chief publicist at my publishing house. “Frank,” she said as though she was telling me I’d just given birth to twin messiahs, “you just got a grrrrreat Kirkus!”

  I had no idea what the hell a Kirkus was and my first reaction was that it sounded like a kind of mole; yes, it sounded as though I were being told my kirkus mole was benign!

  In a few minutes the brief review, about as long as a Times death notice, from Kirkus Reviews, the Bible of Pre-Publishing, was being faxed to me. I don’t know which was the more glowing of the two of us, the review as it regurgitated out of the machine or me when I read it.

  Favorable reviews kept coming in. Looking back, I should have been unnerved by this, I should have seen the thunderclouds behind the silver lining. But I didn’t, and this must have been how Ted Williams felt, swatting hit after hit; surely, before he ever made it to the Major Leagues, Teddy Ballgame imagined himself at the plate spraying balls all around the park. And now he was doing it. This must be what it’s like to actually be with the young Sophia Loren for the first time (even though that first time would most likely last only three seconds). That is how I felt. After decades of failure and futility, dreams finally were coming true, and I had to pinch myself to make sure I was still alive.

  Hey, Mister, maybe I can really do this here novel-writing thing!

  I had developed the first man-crush of my life that wasn’t on an athlete. It was on me.

  February, last year. T plus two months since I’d nudged DOA over to Clint Reno during that fateful breakfast. (He had pancakes, I had French toast. I paid for the meal, an ominous sign that I failed to note at the time.) I have not yet begun playing poker. . . . I’m about four weeks away from discovering it exists online. I have sent five e-mails to Clint asking about Dead on Arrival. Finally, a week ago, I call. I get his answering machine and ask, voice cracking like a sixteen-year-old boy soliciting a prostitute, “Clint, it’s me, Frank. . . . I’m wondering if there’s been any response yet to the book? Let me know?” Groveling on my knees, throwing my pride into a toilet bowl and flushing it three times just to make sure every last morsel of it goes down.

  A few days later came the following e-mail (I’ll only leave in the interesting bits):

  FD

  So far the news isn’t good. I got this from Glenn Tyler of Lakeland & Barker:

  “Frank Dixon is a master of the suburban
mimetic. . . . I ended up hating his characters as much as any fictional characters I’ve encountered in a long time. . . . The truth is that these creeps are out there, and a perhaps even more dismaying truth is that any married man with a shred of honesty will acknowledge his secret sharer status on at least some levels. . . . I’m going to pass on DEAD ON ARRIVAL. . . . Frank Dixon is terrifically skilled. . . . but his characters gave me a kind of spiritual rash.”

  Sorry, Frank.

  CR

  There were three encouraging things about that rejection: (1) Everything that Glenn Tyler had despised about the book was what I’d loved about it. A “kind of spiritual rash” was just what I’d been aiming for! I thought that was what art was supposed to do; (2) the words “master,” “truth,” “honesty,” and “terrifically skilled” had all appeared; (3) I now had something (“secret sharer”) in common with Joseph Conrad.

  But . . . the “Suburban Mimetic”?

  What does that mean?

  I was a master of the Suburban Mimetic. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? Was this like being Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb? Sure, he engendered the eventual end of humanity and of the planet . . . but at least he was the Father of something.

  Suburban Mimetic. A crash test dummy in a Chevy SUV?

  I looked up mimetic in the dictionary but that didn’t help any.

  Suburban Mimetic Suburban Mimetic Suburban Mimetic Suburban Mimetic.

  For a week I kept repeating those two words over and over again, and when I was alone I said them aloud, over and over again. Suburban Mimetic. Suburban Mimetic. It was like an infectious pop song (I’m ever-eee woman!) I didn’t like but couldn’t shake, playing incessantly between my ears. I repeated them until they became utterly empty meaningless noises . . . but then again, that’s what they’d been in the first place. One night, Wifey even heard me mumbling suburban mimetic in my sleep and had to wake me up.

  In the old days I used to frequent illegal after-hours clubs in the far East Village with my pals Harry Carver and Lonnie Beale: seedy, sweaty punk rock clubs that violated every liquor, fire, and decency law known to man. Bands played until seven in the morning . . . bands with names like Agnostic Front, the Benzene Ring, Major Dump & the Roaring Ones, the Suited Connectors, the Del-Normals, Pierre & the Ambiguities, and often you couldn’t tell when one song ended and the next one began. Many times you wound up only inches away from the drummer or the guitarist; there were no stages, no curtains, no fancy lighting, just sticky floors, leather pants, leopard-skin tank tops and gobs of pomade, sweat, and barf. These places didn’t even open their doors until 2 a.m. and I remember Lonnie once curled up and fell asleep on an amplifier. I am fairly certain that one night, high and drunk and barely able to stand, I’d once held my hands over my ears and tried to drown out the shredding guitars, pounding drums, and piercing indecipherable rage of a band called the Suburban Mimetic.

  1. “Are you really going to use your own name?” Cynthia asked me when the book was, to my astonishment, bought by the publisher. “Maybe you should come up with a penname?” My given name is Franklin W. Dixon and, yes, that is the name of the man (it was really a committee of men) who wrote the Hardy Boys detective novels back in the twenties and thirties. Either my parents had no idea about this (this is what they told me when, at eight, I discovered the Hardy Boys) or they had a sadistic sense of humor. The way I saw it, being named Frank W. Dixon might help me get started as a writer and I wouldn’t be the first to cash in on a famous name (look at Leicester Hemingway, Joanna Trollope, Auberon Waugh, Martin Amis, Zoë Heller, Kate Chopin, and way too many others), so I told Cynthia: “Yeah, let’s go with it.”

  5

  Lovebirds

  It was inconvenient for me, in a hi-tech twenty-first-century way, to have to simultaneously check for e-mails from my agent, check my dwindling Amazon rankings, look for anything new about me on Nexis, and also play poker, so in March, three months plus after I’d turned over DOA to Clint, I paid an IT guy from work to come over and rig up a system on both my computers. This system would automatically bring my e-mail to the front of my screen every five minutes, then return it to the background; it would then automatically scan Amazon and Nexis. The IT guy charged me $500 for setting this up.

  After he left I went to a table with 100- and 200-dollar blinds and where there were strangers to play with, none of the usual friends. “My Poker Buddies” was what I now called them to Cynthia, just as I now called Cynthia “Wifey” to my Poker Buddies (they also called her “Mrs. Chip Zero” or just “Mrs. Zero.”). Like the U.S. being broken down into red and blue states, my world was dividing into two camps: the real and unreal.

  I folded the first two hands, then won $400 the next hand. The next hand the other players folded and I stole their blinds. Then I lost $200 with three Queens. Very dispiriting. But the next hand I won with trip 9s and was up over $800 since I’d logged on. The fee for the new program was now more than paid for, and suddenly my screen displayed my e-mail. Nothing from Clint Reno concerning DOA. Then, without having to press a button, the Amazon rankings for Plague filled my screen. Four out of five stars. Twenty-seven customer reviews, ten of them written by me. Sales rank: 547,901. The screen then switched to Amazon’s Love page. Two stars. Sales rank: 621,881. (Is there a point when you don’t have a ranking anymore, when your book just sails out to the horizon and finally falls off the face of the Earth?)

  The new system worked like a charm.

  There was no news.

  But I kept winning.

  Toward the end of March I decided to work only half-days at my job. I didn’t tell Diane Warren, my boss, that it was because I was making more money at poker than I was working for her; instead I told her (and it killed me to hear myself say it), “I need to devote more time to my craft.” My craft. Yes, it sounded like I wanted to fix my motorboat, but I told her I was writing a book, that I had an actual deal for said book, and that I needed to spend more time on it. Diane asked what the novel was about and, since I wasn’t writing one, I told her it was Book I of my American Nightmare Trilogy. (In truth, Books I, II and III had been written over a decade before and were turning yellow in a tiny dusty closet in a Chelsea storage facility. More truth: I had no idea where on Earth the key for that closet was.)

  After much deliberation I opted to not tell Wifey about this half-day move of mine.

  Returning home from work one day—I’d usually grab a cheeseburger, fries, and chocolate shake from a coffee shop across the street—at 12:30, I logged on to the Galaxy, played for an hour or two or three and, in the midst of an up-and-down streak (you can play ten hours straight and still wind up with the same amount of money you started with, to the penny), I saw that I had received an e-mail from Toby Kwimper, my editor at my former publisher.

  FD:

  I have some bad news. I was just laid off.

  I just want you to know that it was a pleasure working with you. Plague and Love were two of the better books I worked on here.

  I’ll give you my new e-mail address when I get a new job. If I get a new job. In the meantime I intend to do nothing but golf golf golf golf!

  Toby

  I felt terrible for Toby. Even upon my worst enemies I wouldn’t wish unemployment. As anyone who has ever been axed knows, it’s a devastating event, like falling into a bottomless pit a second after a ten-ton weight has landed on you.

  I sent this to Toby.

  Toby:

  I just hope it wasn’t my two books that got you laid off! Sorry to hear about this.

  Good luck wherever you do wind up.

  FD

  Now, I was only kidding with that first line. Neither book had sold well, but surely Toby wasn’t getting laid off because of me.

  Two minutes later I received:

  Frank, I don’t know a nice way of saying this but, yes, Plague and Love didn’t help me here. As you know, the books did not perform. Someone has to take the fall.

&
nbsp; That was tough to read. I had gotten a man I liked and had genuinely enjoyed working with fired from a job he loved . . . and all I had done was write two books. The most positive thing that I’d ever been a part of had undone the man who had assisted me with it.

  (A third of the way through the editing process, Toby fobbed Love: A Horror Story off onto another editor, Jerome Selby, who’d been working there forty-plus years. A week later the venerable Jerome Selby blew his brains out . . . and the book reverted back to Toby to finish. While I did not believe that my book was directly responsible for the legendary editor offing himself, Mrs. Jerome Selby cast such a brutal glare my way at the funeral—it was how Mary Todd Lincoln would have looked at John Wilkes Booth—that I’m no longer so sure.)

  I turned off my computer and stared out the window until everything blurred.

  After a half-hour of feeling so bad for Toby I could smell my inner organs decaying, I crawled back into the Galaxy. Some college kid from Columbus named Buckeyes Rule XXX nailed me right away with two Queens (“Ha ha! Take THAT, Chip Zero!”) but it took me only three hands to erase the scarlet-and-gray-clad frosh’s winnings from that and then some.

  One weekday afternoon I promised myself, Okay, I’m not going to play poker. . . . I’m going to begin a new book. Or maybe it was: I’ll only play a few games today and tomorrow . . . and when I hit the $50,000 mark I’m going to find the key to the storage closet and I’ll go back to the American Nightmare Trilogy and I’ll cut it, sharpen it, make it something I can show a publisher. After twenty minutes of staring at my computer screen and doing nothing, I logged back onto the Galaxy, won three thousand dollars in forty minutes, logged off, and took a walk.

  I know only a few novelists but I ran into one of them that day: Beverly Martin. Two reasons I know so few writers spring to mind: (1) I’m not successful and therefore am not invited to any book events; (2) I’m jealous of every single other writer and it kills me just to be in their distinguished, superior presence. It’s simply better for my digestive and circulatory systems to not know them. Had I lived in his time and been introduced to Leo Tolstoy, I believe I really might have asked him: “Hey, could you please tell me where you plan on being buried so that way I know where to go to pee on your grave?”