Psycho City, Qu’est-ce que c’est ?

So, I get a call from my erstwhile agent, who seems highly pleased at having cashed a large check from his favorite client – me, and he says to me, he says,”Hey, how’s about a nice 3,000 word piece on night life in the city for a major men’s pub? High profile, AEP (all expenses paid, for the uninitiated, including me), like ‘Sex In The City’ but without the Sex.” I counter that sex will likely enter into it, being New York and all. He gingerly replies, “Yeah, but not for you, right?” I claim to have rice milk boiling over on the stove and hang up.

Two hundred messages later (okay – I exaggerate,) he nails me on my cell phone. He first asks me where I am and I truthfully tell him I’m in Westchester on my way back to the city. I immediately bite a mental knuckle when I realize he did this to avoid getting the old “Oh, I’m going through the Tunnel” routine, as there is no tunnel on my route, and he knows it. “So, have you given any thought to writing that piece?” I tell him it doesn’t fit into my writing plans right now, but to thank his contact (no point burning a bridge – or tunnel, for the matter – unless especially necessary. “Oh, but you don’t understand – XXX and YYY are doing the same thing for their burgs and it’s going to run as a serial, and they’ve already agreed. I even heard that ZZZ might want in . . .” I told him that it was indeed tempting, but that I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for it. Besides, wasn’t ZZZ dead, or worse, living la vide loca in some third-world backwater? And here is exactly what he said, after which I could not, no matter how desperately I tried, reach him, his personal assistant or anyone who could be pinned down with the responsibility of conveying the message of “NO THANK YOU” to his wax-packed, money-grubbing ears: “Great. I’m so glad you’ve changed your mind. I’ll let them know. It’ll be great! Hey, I’m going into a bad area – let me call you back . . .” Click. Brilliant. Much better than I could ever do. That’s why he’s the agent and I, sadly, am not.

Eventually, he did return my call. Magically, an envelope with the assignment parameters arrived by messenger the very moment he rang me. My suspicions of stalking activity were hence confirmed. Inside the envelope was a cleverly stupid “This Assignment, Should You Choose To Accept It” memo from the assistant city editor of this magazine, plus vouchers for meals, transportation and entertainment at specific places, along with an itinerary, contact names and numbers to confirm reservations already made by the magazine. Nice, right? Wrong – rude. It assumes that I have nothing in my schedule and so, am completely open to jet-setting, or whatever it’s called these days, via some West Coast twenty-something’s idea of a good time in New York. Too bad everything was scheduled for the week I was to be at my house in New Jersey: Thanksgiving Week. Was this a gag? Poor planning? Was the magazine getting discount rates for what would certainly otherwise be a dead week? Then why “hire” me to provide literary ambiance? It looked more like writing a series of reviews on places that, for all I knew, were college chums of one of the hundreds of “editors” on the mastehead, or advertisers in one of the publisher’s localized magazines. I called the assistant, something I will almost NEVER do.

Eight minutes holding. I should have hung up. I’m not stuck up, but, c’mon – eight minutes? Click, clunk, finally, “Hey, hey, XXX here. How are you? How’s the weather back East? It must be freezing, right? I went to XXX U out there and I was so glad to get back to Cali you have no idea! OMG!” As soon as this obviously ex-English minor slash business major spelled out an abbreviation that represented the exact same number of syllables as the lautish “Omigod” phrase it references, I stopped her. “Hello, look, I can’t do this piece in the time frame you have scheduled.” Silence. “And I don’t think I should do it as you’ve laid it out.” More silence. I waited a moment. “Hello?” I heard a sigh over from the other end. “Ya know,” she began slowly, “we publish a large number of magazines. We’re in the business of content. Content wrapped by advertising. Advertising pays our bills. Advertising pays our salaries. The content must complement our advertising. It used to be ‘location, location’, now it’s ‘CONTENT'” She was fairly shouting at this point.

I realized that this young lady was reciting to me something that scared her into her most current incarnation, something that assured her of authority to disregard any sensibility, artistic, ethical or otherwise, provided that she maintain the party line. I’ve met poor lost souls like her before. I knew as sure as the wind blows in Lubbock that there would be no getting through to her. Her fear was a far greater barrier than any amount of rational thinking could ever overcome. She was negotiating “from a position of strength” which she clearly misunderstood as the laying down of the law. Her law. The empowering boss’ law. The law of the jungle that is magazine publishing. After all, God didn’t negotiate with Moses, did he?

“Okay,” I said in my most obsequious tone, wanting to be done with this, “all I need to know is where I should return these materials and when you need them by, and I’ll take care of it.” Silence. I could hear a tap, tap, tap of what surely were wrapped, rock-hard fingernails on a teak desktop. “Listen, that’s not what I meant,” she blathered in a panic,”it’s just that, that, listen, could we start over, listen, can you hold on?” Click – on hold music. A new voice said,”Hey, hey, how are ya, hey, XXX just let me know you were on the line and I wanted to say how much I loved the new book. So, how’s the weather back East? You must be freezing your nuts off, right? Hey, hey. Look, about this project . . .”

I stopped him. I asked him who he was. He was, of course, the young lady’s mentor, naturally, and God knows what else, yet, his name was not mentioned. Hmm. Why my cat had to die and these people continue to live is beyond me. I now wanted to do this “project” just because I could, but I needed to only do it the way I know how – on my specific and exacting terms. After all, I don’t know another way. I explained this patiently, slowly and completely. I pictured the mini-mogul on the other end flipping the speakerphone on and making quacking hand motions with his newly freed limb. Curse opposable thumbs. I concluded my serenade. “Okay,” says he, whose name I have not yet learned, so egotistical is he that he hadn’t yet bothered to introduce himself, since I would only have said “Who?” no matter what name he proferred. “Okay, so, let me get this straight. You go where you want, when you want, you’ll pay for it, and you’ll delver a piece to be edited before Jan One? Correct?” Satisfied, I said, “Very basically speaking, that’s correct. I’m glad we got to this . . .” He cut me off, “And you’ll pay?” “Sorry? Pay? You mean for food and so forth?” “Yeah, yeah. That’s it.” “Um, yes, I suppose . . .” “Great – it’s a deal. Listen, it was great chatting with you and I insist on drinks when you come out to LA. Hey – thanks!” Click.

Why, oh, why, I lament, must there be people like this? Is there no other way to deal with the world? A thought then occurred to me. Los Angeles people are California people. In general, as my judgment is influenced by one major court case after another from that sunny state, Californians have a very strange way of looking at the obvious. Let’s see – OJ: not convicted of any crime relating to the dispatch of Nicole and Ron to the next world, but liable for damages relating to their wrongful death; Peterson is convicted without physical evidence directly tying him to the crime, without eyewitnesses or a confession – but he was just nasty enough, so, he must have done it; the Menendez brothers nearly got out alive – after two trials, confessions and thirteen million dollars spent convicting them; Michael Jackson – hey, I don’t think one need say more there; Rodney King was beaten to tender juiciness on videotape but,nope, not enough for the Californian jury to find the police officers who denied the assault (“Depends on how you look at it,” said one) guilty of anything. It’s sunny all the time. There are no seasons. Therefore, to quote a favorite movie, the sunlight has really put the zap on their heads.

I used Google to look up the office of the publisher whose headquarters were actually in New York. I contacted their editorial department, after pressing nines and ones and sixes frequently enough for me to suspect I was sending a secret code to the enemy. I got a twenty-something ex-English major in that department and I explained that I was trying to return some materials. She said,”Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. X, I really would have wanted to read your piece.” Ummmm, writer’s Viagra. “I read (an obscure piece I wrote for another large publication) and I really felt the darkness slowly evolve into light as the piece wore on – a very subtle effect. I’m really so very sorry . . .” Strike that – writer’s Cialis now. “I’m also sorry that you’re out of my league – could I ask you to hold on while a senior editor is brought over to speak with you?” I mumbled yes, sure, of course, yes and in less than a minute, or what seemed like less than a minutes, XXX, formerly of XXX fame, was on the line. “It’s an honor to speak with you, X, I’m sorry it had to be under less than positive circumstances.”

Really – it was a change of wind most favorable to this sailor. After explaining what I thought I should do, XXX said, “You know, you’re probably right. You can send those materials back to us here, if you like, or just throw them away. That’s not important. Besides, the LA folks are salespeople and I’m sure they have their priorities.” I was in love. “I would like to write the piece, but I would need to be free of the advertising payola – it’s too unseemly for me.” She said that of course there should be no such issue and that she can’t imagine what they were thinking. She asked me to sit on the project for a day while she talked to her “people.” I agreed. There was no hurry, after all: if the project wasn’t being done, one more day of it not being done wouldn’t bother anyone, least of all me.

She called the very next day, properly after breakfast, and let me know that due to “how I had been mistreated” and the fact that the other two writers never agreed to do a series, that in fact I had been used as the lever to get them aboard and how ZZZ who was last seen in East Timor with a lady of uncertain youth, would be unlikely to contribute, the entire project was being shelved. “Oh.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. XXX then said, “However, I have a piece that I think was tailor-fitted for you . . .” Pregnant pause and, oh, yes, let the seduction begin, ” . . . and it’s along the lines of . . . ” and she went on to describe the project and I simply loved it. By the end of our tete-a-tete, I wanted to have her babies.

Love it. So, I will do it. And maybe, for this, I will win a Pulizter. Probably not. But that’s okay – as anyone can tell, I need a break. OMG, do I ever!