CHAPTER TWO

 

There comes a time when every man feels the urge to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats.
H.L. Mencken

The phone rings.

Mom was out somewhere, visiting with Ellen, or shopping, or she could have been at the clinic down the street. I don’t remember what I was doing either, when that call came. See, when something bad happens out of the blue your mind tends to cancel out details from just before it. Like when Mom told me on the phone that her breast cancer was back, had invaded her bones, I remember the sound of her voice, casual, as was her suggestion that I visit her in North Carolina, “maybe even stay for a while,” and when she added that there was an ocean beach nearby with waves I could surf, I knew she really needed me. I remember all that like it happened a minute ago but I can’t for the life of me remember precisely where I was or what I was doing when we spoke.

Same thing here. I well remember the phone call itself, even now as I write from my idyllic little Caribbean island some three years later, and two years after Mom died. The call was from New York, from Penguin Putnam, Inc., the company that was to publish my previous book, In Search of Captain Zero. It was my new editor. The original editor, who had acquired my manuscript for the house, had left for another job, something outside of book publishing as I recall. (In publishing jargon, I was “orphaned.”) The new editor, whom I had not yet met or talked to, introduced herself, then immediately told me that my book, my manuscript, would have to be cut from its present 120,000 words to 80,000. Said this without asking how I am or anything like that first.

Before I could even respond, my writer’s queasy gut flared.

I should explain about my writer’s queasy gut. Sometimes when I’m writing or thinking about writing or talking about writing to someone like a movie producer or studio executive or even just to a normal non-writer – if he’s saying something about writing as if he knows anything about it – I get a bad feeling, which I refer to as my writer’s queasy gut. In fact, just writing this paragraph has caused a flutter of my writer’s queasy gut, the full-blown version of which is like you have a swarm of terrorized centipedes down in your duodenum writhing maniacally, trying to get the fuck out.

I exaggerate only slightly.

Until this phone call, a full-blown attack of my writer’s queasy gut was a rarity, especially since I’d quit writing for the movies and television, left Hollywood altogether. Since then I’d mostly just get flares and flutters of it.

So my new editor leading off our first talk with the bulletin that 40,000 words would have to be cut from my manuscript resulted in a flare of my writer’s queasy gut. (A flare is more serious than a flutter, but nothing like a full-blown attack.) Imagine that the centipedes, having been snoozing, are now stirring, some of them stretching their legs, of which there are a bunch; about a hundred, I think.

“So you’ve gotten around to reading it,” I said, referring to my manuscript. Before leaving his job at Penguin Putnam, my old editor told me that my new editor had not yet read my manuscript.

“No, not yet,” my new editor said. Then this: “I don’t have to read your book to know how long it should be.”

The centipedes were rudely awake now, and getting edgy.

I myself was pretty much speechless. Not at the 40,000 words that according to my new editor would have to be cut, and not even that she believed she could know how long a book should be without reading it. I was speechless that she would say that in a first conversation with a person with whom she was about to embark upon a lengthy and in the best of scenarios potentially difficult, demanding, relationship; a creative relationship, and all it implies.

Finally, I tentatively stuttered that William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, which in many ways is similar to my book (my old editor had made this comparison), is close to 200,000 words and one of the most beloved works in American travel literature. “Way too long,” my new editor said in the dismissive tone I would come to know well. “I would have cut it in half.”

Again, I had not met this person before, nor spoken to her nor corresponded with her in any way. This was all her way of saying Hi-how-are-ya. But her comment about how she would have butchered a great book was not what goosed the centipedes to writhe maniacally. That came a minute or so later, in the context of how we’d work together.

“If we have a creative difference, we’ll talk it out,” I was now saying, near panic but hiding it well. (Maybe not that well, actually. Mom came home soon after the phone conversation and seeing the expression on my face, said, “My God, Allan, what happened?”)

“We won’t bother with any of that,” my new editor said in reply to my hope that a dialogue would settle creative differences. “You’ll never change my mind about anything.”

You’ll never change my mind about anything.

From Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer’s Memoir, and a Tale of a Lost Surfer’s Paradise by Allan C. Weisbecker