scoubidou's Open Salon Blog

The Arrow Book Club and Its Missed-Contents

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:11:26 -0500

Sitting at work protecting the glass double doors from unknown terrors, I watch the pumpkin colored leaves catting after one another along the sidewalk, and I know, I say, This is autumn. And this makes me think, quite naturally of…well, Scholastic Book Services, specifically the Arrow Book Club.

I am atremble with nostalgia. Books bring me home. And Arrow, tailor-made and kid-tested (presumably) for grades 4-5-6, was once the gate of exquisite delight.

Remember the monthly slender cheap-paper catalogs with all those varieties of experience stacked inside? Inexpensive books, some as little as sixty-five cents, perfectly written, perfectly created.

All right, some were awful. The Shark in Charlie’s Window comes to mind, a hybrid of children’s exotic pet fantasy and Jaws—a little too cheesy. But for the most part, I was not disappointed with these worlds that SBS offered.

I know I read enough of them (and bought enough) to build myself a tomb, but only a few titles are yet clear in memory. The SBS dealt in three genres principally: kid detective thrillers, historical fiction, and the so-called Problem Novels.

Detective thrillers were represented by The Three Investigators series, in my mind far superior to the rather tepid shenanigans of the Hardy Boys. Even at nine I could recognize the added senses of humor and irony, and The Mysterious Three were each offbeat enough to add a dimension of empathy (the Hardys always struck me as mannequins, and not, frankly, very good detectives). The cases were formulaic (as is Agatha Christie), but there was a keep-rolling panache to the doings that primed us all for derring-do Doc Savage reprints. And at the end of each adventure, they reported in to…Alfred Hitchcock.

I betcha we read the same books: Silver for General Washington, My Side of the Mountain, Soup and Me, The Phantom of Walkaway Hill…

One of my all-time faves was Strangely Enough!, a compendium of eighty “hair-raisers” culled from C. B. Colby’s column Adventure Today! in The White Plains Post-Dispatch. Tales of ghosts and flying saucers, buried treasures on land and sea, hairbreadth’s escapes and Fortean mythos! Colby was a marvel of word economy and I often recall him to mind when I grow too loquacious. Strangely was a rare find captured in my mother’s cedar closet (perhaps reserved for when I was older) at age eight. I read it in a single sitting, all day, as the October failing sun lengthened the shadows of the trees along the woods. I have re-read the book almost every October since.

Arrow offered selected reprints of 1950s Mad Magazine material, such as The Greasy Mad and The Mad Frontier, thus allowing me to see the glories of the once independently-owned savagely satirical magazine—from the time when it ridiculed Madison Avenue ad merchants and finky politicians. I remember trying to watch Hollywood or Bust on Flippo’s Early Show and reading Greasy at the same time—and then later a huge-ass storm comes Dorothy Gale-ing out of nowhere and I ended up getting smackerooed in the kisser by a fistful of hailstones…You wouldn’t recognize Mad today (or even Arrow) and Flippo died a couple of years ago—not even the storms are quite the same.

Now I’m flashing back to those Scholastic Press hardbacks—the anthologies of ghost and mystery stories, the young athlete tales of struggling left-hand pitchers and gridiron smallfry dime-backs. And the soap box racers! And all those I bought at the block yard sale, from David Robinson’s stash…and how all his books had library proprietary markings, and I remembered how the school library had been broken into the year before…but if David (Blessed be the womb that bore him!) five-fingered books, he grabbed classics. He had a volume of Poe, goddammit!

The challenged-athlete books grew into the Problem Novel. I loved the Problem Novel, even though the best ones were for TAB, not Arrow members. They always had carnival titles: Then Again Maybe I Won’t, I’ll Get There It Better Be Worth the Trip, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich—as if Maya Angelou was making ends meet by tossing out her unused material. The Problem Novel was supposed to be the turning point of a kid facing an ultimate moral dilemma. I saw a posted modern “concerned parent” reacting to “titles and subjects in Scholastic flyers that curl my toes.” She would have loved I’ll Get There It Better Be Worth the Trip from our long-gone 1970s, in which the thirteen-year-old principles wind up trying to back-burner their homosexual experiences and just try to “be friends.” (To think Gore Vidal had virtually been blacklisted for The City and the Pillar a few decades earlier!)

(Just so you know, I am writing a Problem Novel with a glorious title as séanced through Patty Highsmith. The title shall remain veiled at this point.)

Arrow offered other neat stuff, like posters and especially like Dynamite Magazine. Dynamite was edited by Jeanette Khan, who later went on to run DC Comics into the ground. Dynamite imitated Mad in some aspects (all these years later, Mad Kids imitated Dynamite). It was a skinny-assed wash of color trap-birded between cardboard covers, and we werewolfed down every issue. Dynamite defined fifth-grade cool. Ask me, however misguided Khan’s shipwreck at DC, she created ‘80s Nickelodeon Chic with Dynamite. Every slim page was printed on gold, I think. It was Esquire for brats. Wish I still had all those.

Arrow was on-target always in sniffing out trends and capturing the loose change of the popular kid-minded moment. There was a unity in their line and some sort of quality-assurance program that publishers in general have never mastered (which is very likely a good thing).

A friend with young girls sent me some recent flyers (thanks Teri), or as I prefer to call them, catalogs. *sigh* Yes, the grass is no longer as green as it was under Tom Sawyer’s toes.

Harry Potter is frighteningly ubiquitous. Way too overwhelming, too much of a publiswhorial piñata. I know J. K. Rowling wordfilters as Anne Rice for latter-day gridiron midgets, but Jaysus Rumble, break it up, willya? Reissue some Michael de Larrabeiti fer fook’s sake.

And, of course, every novel seems to have a “strong girl heroine”—not much room for boys to dream. If they do, they’ve been getting series trash like Animorphs for the past twenty years. Remember Scott O’Dell’s The Black Pearl? The Problem Novel boy of today is one whose Gundam Guyver is fresh out of ammo.

We never recovered our Arrow head’s lead. When TAB came around, most kids had decided print was beneath contempt, and the teachers at Kennedy Jr. High did not want to futz with it. We irregularly got TAB catalogs. SBS dropped out of my life, except in memories. And yeah, by eleven I was bleeding from the ears after reading David’s copped Poe, but I could sail through Wells. I was on my way to being an intellect vast cool and unsympathetic—or so I hoped.

Yet I sometimes wish there was an Arrow for the Really Big Kids—you know, us. I crave that careful selection, that unity of thought, that fearful symmetry.

In the interest of these precepts, I offer you a short list of adult tomes that give me that old SBS vibe.

Marvin Kaye’s anthologies for Doubleday, such as Ghosts and Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, have the same tingle as SBS ghostly collections—which is not at all to say they are tame, although Kaye purposely excoriates the exact kind of horror that I write (i.e., “nauseatingly vivid”). His erudition on the weird tale is profound.

Mark A. Stein’s How the States Got Their Shape is the kind of you-never-knew-how-much-you-wanted-to-know-this-stuff trivial history that SBS would spin out as a 65-cent special. Painless page-turning little-knowners about the politics behind those odd juts and jagged lines on the map. Ever wonder why California didn’t include Baja, and yet has that weird angle that scarfs up Sandy Eggo before veering North? Well, it wasn’t a surveyor’s bungle.

Elsewhere mentioned, Earl Thompson’s dynamic duo of A Garden of Sand and Tattoo serve as a complex Problem Novel that will curl Concerned Parent’s toes. Will little Jack Anderson try to resolve his issues of poverty via incest? Will he fuck his way to the top of his lowlife? Then Again, Maybe He Will.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower stuff bristles with SBS fantasy inanities (what, a robot bear with a satellite dish on its head?) and is just as page-turning as any juvenile detective novel. It’s a western, it’s a medieval fantasy, it’s a mystery story—it’s good fun.

I’ve already invoked de Larrabeiti. With The Borribles, you cannot go wrong—imagine if Tolkien had accidentally written The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Remember how those historical fictions took you there? Gary Jennings’ Aztec leaves the same pleasurable boom in your belly. It is also the work of a man who accepted a dare to include every sexual perversion known to man. And I hafta pimp Scott O’Dell, the first pro writer to praise me. His “juveniles” function perfectly as historical adventures. He’s somewhere between Hemingway and Stevenson.

That’s a suggested short list. If you’ve got any of your own, I’d love to hear about them.

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Dig that Crazy Tadzio, Mann

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:11:16 -0500

I’ve referenced elsewhere (“When I Write of the Veldts”) of the various postmodern riffs, pastiches, and sheer parody that I’ve shaken out of Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice. I’ve spoofed it from Tadzio’s point of view (in which the boy remains clueless about von Aschenbach’s “grand passion”); I’ve even crossed swords with Lovecraft, revealing that the “plague” is not at all cholera, but a fungoid migration of the Mi-go from Yuggoth (“The Shadow Over Venice”).

But if we actually park it back at the source material…I’m not really all that impressed. Yes, I am aware that Thomas Mann shat marble and that he was a Past Master of the Nobel Prize stripe (eyes rolling at the mention of Nobel Committee). I am aware that Death in Venice is yet celebrated, discussed, parsed, and has been rendered into a classic film and at least one opera (no comic book series yet).

Death in Venice is also communicable: it certainly lies at the heart of Suddenly, Last Summer and Love and Death on Long Island (the author Gilbert Adair also wrote a biography of Mann’s actual crush, Baron Wladyslaw Moes, in The Real Tadzio). Nabokov was all too aware of the classic; when his own tale of pedophile obsession was under threat of blue pencil, he snorted “if I’d written about a man chasing after a boy, it would have been all right.”

Did I just use the p-word? After a full century of artistic obfuscation (not the least being riddled throughout the original work), Death in Venice is, after all, a story about a middle-aged man pantering after a slender reed of a boy. Mann was a little self-conscious; Tadzio is fourteen, but his inspiration, the Baron Moes, was all of eleven. Mann was around thirty-five. The three or four years, in our statistics-conscious culture, serve to make the Grand Passion a little less creepy.

In 1912, the idea of this oblique romance was pretty racy, but was not considered the overripe sickness it would be today. Children had an ambiguous role in the culture—a boy Tadzio’s age could be working long hours in a factory or mining, could be found driving a car. Prosecution for sexual interactions were rare, and when so, the offended party was God, not the child. An earlier Wikipedia article on Death in Venice had a great line: “Today von Aschenbach trailing Tadzio through the streets of Venice would be arrested as a dangerous pedophile.” Well, he certainly wouldn’t be the first artiste to lose his head (and social position) over a young boy, and Michael Jackson won’t be the last.

In 1912 (and thereafter), Death in Venice was quickly abstracted and digested as an allegory of the pursuit of Beauty, or even of Truth (offset by the lies the money interests tell to keep the plague secret from the tourists); of the pursuit of lost youth; as an examination of Art itself. Would that it were. Death in Venice is a flat naturalistic almost dear-diary reportage of an injudicious boner, with more than a bit of classical mookery tossed in as a red herring.

The entire petard is an accountant’s notebook of a ten-year-old boy’s sartorial resources, and whether or not he is barefoot today when on the beach. (“He was barefoot,” Mann inevitably tells us, as if surprised.) Well, all right, Death in Venice is more than merely that. It is also a durable almanac of the weather. Mann does not let a slate-colored sky go by without comment, and he is attentive to each mist and every sirocco. Aschenbach is a weathervane pendulent between boy’s bottom and the too-hot day. More often than not, the weather wins out.

The subject of the novella, as you’ve been told, is the worship of a boy. From this, Tadzio has become a bit of an icon in certain quarters, and he has rather escaped the boundaries of his own book, in which he is not especially interesting.

Some delicious essay I read online a few years ago declared that Tadzio is a triune: there is the real Tadzio, the model, Wladyslaw Moes; the Tadzio of the book; and Bjorn Andresen, the Swedish meatball who stuck to the screen in Visconti’s 1971 movie. (Andresen has become an emblem of boy-desires, from appearing in Japanese cigar ads while a child [!] to much later serving as coverboy for Germaine Greer’s odd ode to female pederasty, The Beautiful Boy.)

Producing a contemporary portrait of Moes, the writer made a smart remark about Mann’s Ideal, something along the lines of the curious opaqueness of people’s tastes. Indeed, Wladyslaw (misheard nickname, Wladzio) was not likely to turn heads, and would have been unlikely to have had a callback from Visconti’s casting director. He looks a little—well, creepy. But we remind ourselves that Mann seems to have a morbid Poe’s taste in young girls transmigrated to young boys—he joyfully describes Tadzio as “not long for this world” more than once, and even takes time to unfavorably reflect on the boy’s dentition. (From Annabel Lee to Berenice, as it were.)

Consider then the Tadzio of the here and now to be a meme, a pop culture-created character, because Mann doesn’t do much for him. He describes Tadzio’s wear down to the cufflink, but he reserves only to the generic for the Perfect Boy. We have an essential initial description of the boy’s features, but he does not much dwell on them (which seems odd for a subject of obsession). Past that it’s all sailor suits, red ties and belted waistcoats. One comes to feel that Aschenbach could have had it off just as well with the empty swimsuit as with the contents. Tadzio, in the novella, allegedly the maelstrom center, is functionally parenthetical.

I’ll credit that the observations of Tadzio are distant, and so it is appropriate that the boy remain an enigma, but sooner or later you are forced to realize the entire narrative occurs, quite dully, in Aschenbach’s own head. He is the only character; he only interacts with himself. In that, Death in Venice is quite tedious.

Tadzio is a “frail unthinking object” (and you thought sexism couldn’t be intragender!)—a Grecian statue. Everyone else is an officious little prick who misdirects either Aschenbach’s luggage or his Sherlockian investigations of the spreading plague. Death in Venice is often merely the tale of a cultured Mittle-European snob’s vacation gone wrong.

Von Aschenbach is drawn so woodenly that he is unbearable. Considering he is his author’s close avatar, he is incredibly static and unrevealing—a simplistic figurine in a threadbare fake-allegory who hits one or two flat notes before sliding under his beach chair.

The blurb from my 1971 Ballantine paperback movie tie-in declares Death in Venice to be a classic of “sensual awakening.” It is nothing of the sort. Aschenbach never awakes sensually: he is merely sexually confused. Nevermind that the “case evidence” does not suggest that one simply awakens one day to the sexual angles of young boys (although that conceit would be useful in a court defense), but is rather likened to a career. It’s more likely that von Aschenbach would have a lifetime backlog of Tadzios, which makes this entire farrago disingenuous.

I have the feeling in reading criticism of Death in Venice that other critics have gotten ahold of some entirely other edition. One critic describes Aschenbach discovering a passion for Venetian oarsmen, which may be more of an attempt to normalize him as an androphile figure. Another elaborately describes Tadzio, but the description appears nowhere in Death in Venice, actually better describes me at the age of eleven (or any number of slav boys)—and is actually better drawn than Mann’s description. On a minor point, yet another declares that Aschenbach “discovers the true nature of his passion for Tadzio” after a Dionysian Dream. Well, not really. Perhaps Death in Venice is a bit of a Rorschach Blot.

Mann steps too carefully to reveal the true nature of anything. He buries his true story of a sad sack’s inactivist mooning over a little kid into a puffery with Greek Gods (somehow he sorely missed tossing in Thanatos, the most relevant). Rather than analyze what all this means, he chooses a Wagnerian cop-out and winds it all up with a big whoop death scene. Forbidden passion, even if unrequited, leads to death. It’s an old story, but I’ll tell it again—after all, Mann did. Forbidden passion, even if unrequited, leads to death.

This Mann-Boy love story however could have gone only one other way. That is, with the seduction of the object of his affection, leaving the idolized principle sticky broken and confused. This would have blown the blue pencil fuse, would have ended the fancy-dress costume play. Perhaps Mann was afraid that his “great theme” novella would have thence served as mere prologue to a policier. At the very least, Death in Venice would have been subtitled Banned in Canada.

As a tale of “sensual awakening”—pederastic or otherwise— Death in Venice is vegetarian. All these years later it remains a pretentious artifact, a mausoleum to the inability to get up from one’s deck chair, whereas it might have been psychologically penetrative. It is not illuminative; it is a work of art that comes not from artifice, but from deception, a coded message in which the original message is too weak to bother the decoder ring.

In Death in Venice what we have is a book about a man lying to himself written by a man lying to us while lying to himself.

One final note, to end this on a shiver, because fright is what we aim for. About ten years ago, I killed time in the Carolinas with a biography of Thomas Mann. The author solicitously mentioned that Mann’s diary contained a note—when his son Klaus reached the Death in Venice age—that he had “fallen in love” with his boy. Klaus later wrote a story, the author goes on to mention, wherein a daughter has pleasurable incest with her father. The biographer pretty much leaves it there, but that’s a pretty big tiger, eyeing us from across the rug.

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Sex Plus Sex is Still Less Than Earl Thompson

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:10:23 -0400

Earl Thompson is the writer most people have never heard of. Those that have read him understand this and feel safe stealing from him. His time, they must innately feel, has come and gone, and won’t be round again ever.

I’d be just as dry on the subject if not for the poverty in my early twenties. A wizened lady opened a local paperback trading emporium, where you could bring any book in and use it to get other books. Bring those back when you’d read ‘em and start over. It worked for me—unemployed or underemployed, surviving on a lunchmeat sandwich a day, I could always find the governor’s sixteen cents to throw in on a dozen new old books.

Among the thousands of titles I found Thompson’s first book, A Garden of Sand. Great freaking title, from the get-go. Even if a fictionalized memoir of a desperate young boy’s survival in Depression-era Kansas wasn’t your first choice, how could you pass up a cover blurb that teased, in 22-point type, “Sex plus sex equals X-Rated Book”? OK, I’ll bite.

Yes, sex-plus-sex—all kinds, frankly fleshed out. But reducing Garden to one-handed holding is like handing over Anais Nin to Harold Robbins. The sex is the string that usually runs out in hardboiled novels; here, it illuminates a phantasmic zoetrope of often bitter, always peripatetic Midwestern lowlife.

The book is anchored in the boyhood of a Swedish-American horndog named Jack Anderson, who is endlessly crawling through the runoff of the American Downturn. He is the receiver of fisticuffs from his prostitute mother’s thug boyfriend Bill, and the cynosure of store detectives’ eyes. Jack is clever as Huck Finn, but, well, hungry and evil. His mother joins the list of his desperate conquests.

Shocking? Sure, in our post-Reagan reality. In the early 70s, when Thompson was producing, this was the logical grit. It was the era of cute incest (Au Souffle de Coeur, for example), but Thompson was playing for keeps. He was heretical even in those open, quasi-Amsterdamned times.

Thompson followed this huge, exploring novel with a book just as big, but even better. Tattoo finds fourteen-year-old Jacky faking his birth cert to get into the fight in WW2. He’s ambivalent re patriotism: he just wants out of the welfare sandtrap. He boosts in—just in time for Japan’s surrender. But you know Jack will find opportunity for a whole new sordid evolution in decadent, war-strafed Asia. Like Tom Ripley, his nature is to zag in the zig world.

At one time, I had everything Earl Thompson had ever written. QED: There were only four books, make that three-and-a-half, and Thompson went AWOL on us—a coronary case at forty-eight. In my humble opine, he left two unrecognized classics of American Literature, as cited. His third book, Caldo Largo, was a kind of runaway student assignment, a shameless pastiche of Hemingway that should have stayed in his dormroom. The fourth, The Devil to Pay, was intended to wrap up a Jack Anderson trilogy, but it is flyweight and clearly something found and stretched out by an untalented literary executor. It reads like Harold Robbins—who is hopefully out of print by now.

The diptych however remains a sweet remorseless series of sorties through the American Nightmare, never afraid to cashier the main narrative so as to tail small-time operators on pulp fiction missions of self-destruction. Imagine Dos Passos as James Ellroy shot through with thirty-calibers of Jean Genet and Lester Dent. With helps from John Irving. For some reason, this passage sticks with me:

Back-of-the-billboards boys, they knew their city the way Michelangelo, in a book of drawings that fascinated them one term, knew anatomy. “Man, he could draw a person from the inside out!” They knew what made the lights go on, where buses slept at night, how the city was fed, where the garbage was hauled. They had an intimate knowledge of what their town ingested, what it discharged and where the process could get hung up.

Thompson rarely gets hung up. This despite a snobby line I ran into from some unremembered critic of the time: “Thompson is often in trouble, at least once every page.” It may be that Thompson was simply not one of the Literary Elect, or it may be that the critic was stunned by the fact that there is something actually happening on every page, which is uncommon with writers in general and hence may have confused the critic. Tattoo and Garden are always in Drive, and Earl doesn’t spare the horses. Whether it is a parrot that swears, a defloration in a Mexican graveyard, or an angry midget that emasculates a cowboy in a dirty fight, you will not find time to long yawn.

Earl Thompson is the kind of writer that can convince you that a lot of things have happened to him. He’s also the sort of writer who stuck his head up and noticed the people and the planet around him. He can communicate savage social criticism without being preachy—another thing that the critic probably confused with “being in trouble.” Thompson speaks of backyard hoods rubbing “twenty-eight coats of candy apple red” onto their prize roadsters and he wrote the same way: endless detail, endless texture. Sex plus sex ain’t all that, and it wasn’t all that he was.

I’ve only seen Earl Thompson’s name come up on the Innertube in the past year. Not much, though he has a Wikipedia page, although it more or less restrings his bio from the paperbacks. I’d like to know more. I wrote the executor and the publisher years ago, but you know how that goes. I offer this review humbly as the only critical review that I know of on the web. Hopefully it won’t be the last.

Can a man get in the classics game with only two books? If they can let in John Kennedy O’Toole with only one, it seems Earl should have a shot. He just might make you rethink the passions and the lives of our most forgotten, and often most despised, citizens.

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F**k You, Alan Rodgers, or, My Magazine Hell

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:10:10 -0400

Quite a number of you have encouraged me to stop writing for free and to hie myself hither and thither to a magazine. A few of you have also pegged that maybe I have had some past bad experiences in the trade...well, shall I go on?

There used to be a shit rag on the racks lo back in the early 80s called Twilight Zone Magazine. (I think you can see where we’re headed right away…) The fiction in there was terrible. The large majority of the stories were rewrites of Stephen King stuff, backwards, forwards, anacrosstic. Maybe the worst one ever was about, like, this girl, and she kept disappearing from, like school, y’know? And ‘nother girl like followed her and she was always standing around at fires? And it was ‘cause it proves she was a fire un-starter, and she was going round helping people, by psi-dissing the fires, ‘kay?

Okay, I’m being ungenerous. The shit I wrote at fifteen wasn’t so good either. But those stories selected for Twilight Stoned were so godzillaawful that you thought, hey, maybe you could do one.

Back in the day, I was stuck with a Smith-Corona. I’m a horrible typist. I make a mistake about every six characters. (I just wrote “hirrible” “abot” and “sx.” And I put “use” for “just.”) This has been the same way since 1979. Imagine having to whip out the white-out for every error, waiting for it to dry, and then retyping.

Typing up a short manuscript was agony.

So I’d send this shit off to Twi-Night Double-Header and wait. Oh, six weeks. Or six months. Or a year.

When they came back, it looked like T.E.D. Klein had fucking been making pastrami sandwiches on them, or using them as flak jackets. (I just put “it” for “they” on the second word in that sentence. Imagine having to redo the whole sentence: or start over. Fucking Smith-Corona.)

Well, those stories I scratched out were bad. As bad as anything T.E.D. Klein ever wrote. And I know that Gus Mailman is as much to blame as Carol Serling or whatever for those treaded-up returns. But after all this—after all those dozens of tardy stinking form rejection slips—I started to craft a personal animus against Swinelight Boner the Mazagine. When it went out business, I had a private party.

Over the next few years, I gave up on T.E.D. Bundy but made other freshman errors. My writing got really good in the meanwhile, but I was still butting my head. I was sending shit out to real private parties that don’t really want your business, like Playboy. I sent stuff out to entirely the wrong markets, thinking somebody might grope for it. Well, when you are nineteen, you think your star is rising—you’re the motherfucking Rhinestone Cowboy.

Then my Dad died and my Mom was already paralyzed from a stroke. I was twenty-one. I needed money badly. I started writing and sending out shit aggressively, everywhere, trying to get one goddam sale to help out.

I wasted a lot of effort and postage trying to sell picture books. I tried floating three chapters and a proposal letter and thinking maybe somebody would bite, and then I could write the rest of the book, lickety split. That got nowhere. The worst, snobbiest, vilest publisher? Viking Press, hands down. Viking can lickety my split—I’m a boy, the one in the back.

Like the rest of the kids in the Stephen King Paperback generation, I thought my calling would be Horror. I was writing Lovecraft pastiches before it was a boom industry. I was tapping out nauseatingly vivid tales before splatterpunk became a do.

Over and again, I got near hits. “I really liked this but” and “almost a sale” started showing up in chicken-scratchery on the edges of form rejections. What nearly sold? My nightmares. I’d write them down, nearly unretouched. (I have nightmares that look just like movies, complete with snappy dialog and pop songs whose lyrics and music don’t actually exist. Even now; I just had a teenage werewolf dream last week that came complete with a new tune called “Extra Sexual Nerves.”)

So anyway, I dreamed when I was nineteen that I was a stalker-killer who ran afoul of a strange religious cult when they inducted my idée-fixe (“Seven Down, Seven Down”) or of a cabinet found on an island that leads to an evil Platonic World of Ideas (“Things Found in the God’s Room”).

Almost…

The hostility of some publishers is awesome. I never got a “you suck” scrawled on my manuscript, but the assholes at Highlights actually sent a form rejection slip that said something of “every submission is like entering a contest and yours didn’t win because it was not as good as others.” A guy I used to correspond with told me he wrote a strange story and an editor sent him a “we don’t need your kind of work, pervert.” I wish I had gotten that one; that almost seems like a badge of honor.

My worst young experience? I sent a story in to a horror magazine. The editor was a pretty well known toff named Alan Rodgers. It came back after a loooong time with this heart-pounder of a note: I really like this, unfortunately this magazine is folding. I’m moving over to a new magazine, and if you send it there, I’d really like to publish it.

My hands were shaking. I was still in my young twenties. This. Was. It. I scrabbled together a package and a nice letter referencing his communiqué and sent it off to Night Cry (I think was the name of the mag.)

It came back about two weeks later, like motherfucking T.E.D. was making pastrami sandwiches on it.

With a form rejection letter.

Know what? After all these years, the Internet has brought some justice to me:

Fuck you, Alan Rodgers. Why don’t you roll up a copy of Night Cry real tight and…

What is the import here? Why am I so angry? Because this could have justified my existence. This could have brought me justice. This could have been the beginning of a resume, the first break, that would have meant that I could have, quite casually, said, “I’m a writer. No, a real one.”

This could have been the beginning of a career, could have probably given me not much money, but a lot of wind in my sails. It could have buoyed my confidence, could have shown me that my writing had value outside of my own head. No, I couldn’t have saved my mother’s life, but she might have had a better final two years. I might have been a million stars away from the desperations between, from the hungers of my now.

This is what that form rejection means to me, what all of them meant to me, but this one in particular.

Isn’t it frightening to know what stories are on the other end of the mail? What a difference, maybe, that one thing could have made.

Eventually, I gave up. I later almost placed a short story at Esquire. That was it for me. I got tired of running alongside, smelling the locomotive’s breath. Curse, karma or being outside the slipstream of the zeitgeist, it was never meant to be my time.

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The Obliteration of Tom Meany

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:10:23 -0400

Out of my car window, he caught my eye. I watched him squinting up at the chilly blue sky, slouched over the cold metal roundabout seat burdened with dirty baggage. I was afraid he would see me. I waited for the light to change. But he did not turn my way; he did not move. He was sagged stone, the object of concern now only to vandals.

The light changed.

Don’t judge me too harshly. Tom Meany would try your patience, too. I remembered him when he was the office snake. But even so, I felt a twinge of pity for him, and a bit of fear. What happened to him shouldn’t happen to…but there you go. This is our world; we make it so.

Several years ago I lucked into a cozy job with a local branch of the Department of Defense. I collated contract documents for auditors. When Uncle Sugar had issues about the glut of money he was sending out to the grubbing hands of the military industrial complex, he kicked the contracts down to our slovenly, soviet-like department. A contract could disappear for a decade. Or more. The Washington Post sent a hit team down on us once. I believe their lead began, “You wouldn’t want your phone bill to be paid here, let alone…”

Now The Post has its hand out too. The Old Gray Mare doesn’t seem too good for a payout herself.

Uncle had low standards for his “auditors” anyway, but how Tom Meany made the cut I don’t know. Tom wouldn’t have made it with any real firm. He was dopey, dumpy, and his white shirts were edged in yellow, with a brown grease mark where his hair hit the collar. He had a sloppy walrus moustache and an indolent look. He didn’t bathe too hard, an olfactory distress set in italics by his habit of sharing his bed with two large Great Danes.

Tom was one of those guys who respirated offense. He couldn’t be in your radius for ten minutes without a casual racially charged remark, without a snipe at feminine ability. Without some whacko interpretation of history. I am convinced he was not aiming thereabouts—it was, as they say, just his way. But, as you know, that way does not wash.

And then there were the crazy bits. Tom Meany, as nuts often do, had an object of fixation which no one else shared, yet he insisted that they must. His hink was the Cleveland Indians ball team. Tom would walk up and offer you endless critiques of their playing, of the reception to their playing, of the potentialities realized and unrealized. He would rebut the opinions of sportscasters and AM radio chat hobbyists. Saying you weren’t up on it at all did not help. Telling him to cease did not stop it. He buzzed on and on, sucking you up like a venomous vampire tsetse fly.

Then he started claiming that the players were using his financial advice. He was doing the whole team’s taxes, you see, and they had invited him on some of their end-of-season cruises, but he was too tied up to go. As of late the coach was seeking his strategic advice, but the fool wasn’t using it. And—oh yes—the Great Danes were just as excited this season as he was; they had learned all the pitching signals, and would bark their approval at smart plays.

This started out as a bit of harmlessness, but it all turned rancid as he slid into personal decline. He was getting written up for his hygiene. He was getting warned about his chatter. So he started making up things about the others, so that he might inform on them.

I was maybe the last person speaking to him, because he hadn’t made a stab at me. But the day came.

It won’t take much background to explain what an audit consists of, not even a government audit. Something has been paid wrong. The auditor researches the payment history of the contract. The auditor finds where the payments were wrongly applied. The auditor prepares a report which shows how the payments should have been made. In the end, the error, or variance, adds up to zero—because the payment issues are balanced.

Tom Meany turned in a contract with a million dollar variance. Folks, that is not close enough for government work, either. Tom was pulled in to explain himself. He blamed me. “I asked him for all the 9-adjustment documents, and he refused to pull them.”

Nice try—except everyone above him also knew that 9 adjustments rarely have any saved documentation, and what is there is handwritten and useless. I’ll stop there—this will get tedious soon enough. I once was riding to lunch with a group of my coworkers and after a half-hour conversation about HAT ACRNs and split-service overseas pays, I realized that we were speaking an entirely alien language, and of entirely alien concerns.

You might think Tom Meany could have been fired on the spot, but I lost my job before he did. Oh, how they loved me—big farewell party at Applebee’s and all—but the term of my appointment was up, and could not be again extended. So I was out.

About a year later, Tom Meany was fired. Sexual harassment, of course. Anybody could see that one coming.

Tom Meany figured one night that his lawyer had failed him. So he went down to the lawyer’s office and put a brick through the office window. When the police found him, he was tearing through files looking for justice.

I later saw Tom Meany in the library, going through the free reference law books. He was sour-faced and his fat was gone—the skin hung in ringers off his cheeks. He looked rough—his belongings next to him in a cardboard box. I walked away before he looked up. Later, I heard that he was living in the downtown men’s shelter.

Did I mention that when I saw him this last, waiting on the bus but perhaps not really waiting on the bus, that he was outside of the “justice” building? He looked lobotomized. He looked empty.

I wondered what had happened to those two Great Danes, the intelligent dogs that could call pitching plays. I wondered what happened to the cockatoo that Meany also claimed to have owned—stress on claimed. I imagined they were lost, as must have been almost everything else, when their master had lost his mind.

What happened to Meany shouldn’t happen to a dog—or anyone. But it did happen, and it was self-inflicted, just as might have been a gunshot wound or a rash of sleeping pills. But he slipped from our fingers. We turned away. I turned away. I would like to think that some wiser society would have found a place for Tom Meany.

But are any other of us more secure? A loss of income, and the things we care about are taken from us. When do you stop being an annoying crank and become a Person of Interest?

When I was a boy, I read a quote from William James; he had some sort of hallucination of a leprous wretch, and came away saying, “That shape am I, potentially.” It shook him; reading it a century later, it shook me.

We could all be Tom Meany.

This chilly night reminds me of that, when I think of our tenuous positions, our slender resources, and the all-too-real texture of the October streets.

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