As for licensing its image, appearing on talk shows, or even just hocking some photos to the tabloids, the amount of money I’d have had to spend on security afterward—security I’d doubt I could ever fully trust—would have rapidly outpaced my earnings, leaving me just as penniless as ever, with a cure that everyone now wanted (and wanted to kill), and no one but my scrawny, shrinking self (and maybe—maybe—my father) to protect it.
But so couldn’t you, say you entrepreneurial squinters, couldn’t you—after earning your boatload of money on licensing its image, appearing on talk shows, or hocking photos to tabloids—couldn’t you put out a press release that falsely announced Kablankey’s death? Don’t you think that would keep the barbarians from storming your gate?
To which I respond: No. I don’t think so at all. Look what’s happened in the wake of the announcement of little Basho’s death. Hardly a month has gone by in which there hasn’t been some story in the papers about a crazy fan or group of crazy fans who, suffering from the wholly unsubstantiated belief that Basho’s death was falsely reported, have attempted to break into the monastery in which Basho used to live; a monastery that, unlike my father’s house, is not only situated in a remote part of the country, but is filled with a one-hundred-plus-strong brotherhood of armed monks.
* * *
—
Having said all that—and all you squinty hardhearts will like this part—I did snap my own photos and shoot my own videos to document Blank’s increasing cuteness, as well as every new song and gag it learned, figuring that one day, if I were to outlive it, I would sell these still and moving images for a comforting sum: if not for hundreds of thousands, then for a reasonable fraction of hundreds of thousands.
A sentimental psychotic I may be, but never have I been a sentimental fool.
At least almost never.
* * *
What is the book that Lotta Hogg mentioned?
It’s a coming-of-age/detective novel called No Please Don’t, and was published in paperback (deckle-edged, French-flapped) in 2006 by Darger Editions, a not-for-profit press “dedicated to providing a platform for outsider voices from the greater Chicago area.” To the surprise of many—including Darger, which printed only two thousand copies—the book received notice (positive, for the most part) in a number of mainstream venues, Rolling Stone and the New York Times among them, and the Dutch translation rights to the novel were bought (for nine hundred euros) by Sobchak, an independent publishing house in Amsterdam, which I was told would put it out as Geen Kont Voor De Trieste in 2007, but then it took three years to sell out its print run (its American print run; I don’t know what happened with the translation—I never held it in my hands, nor heard from Sobchak once they sent me my advance), after which it wasn’t reprinted (Darger went under). It concerns a character named Gil MacCabby who has lost his most beloved plastic action figure, an intergalactic smuggler called Bam Naka. In Part 1 of the novel, ten-year-old Gil, deeply upset by the action figure’s loss, spends a number of weeks searching his parents’ house for it, and, in the midst of his search, a family tragedy strikes, leading Gil to discover some paradoxical truths about himself and his life. Part 2 of the novel sees Gil, fifteen years later, once again searching the house for Bam Naka, which has now become a valuable collector’s item (whether Gil failed, at age ten, to find the action figure, or perhaps found it only to lose it a second time is very deliberately left unclear), and, in the course of the search, he reexamines the truths that he discovered at the end of Part 1, and comes to see how they aren’t so much paradoxical as they are just plain ambiguous. If that sounds uninteresting, it’s probably because I’ve left out some key information (e.g. the discovered-and-then-reexamined truths, the specifics of the tragedy that strikes the MacCabbys) for fear of spoiling their impact on anyone who might be enticed by this summary to read the novel. My hope is that the memoir you’re currently reading will be successful enough to persuade whoever publishes it to bring No Please Don’t back into print. I’m proud of that book.
The one difficulty I have enjoying its (admittedly minor) success is that reviewers had a tendency to spend a lot of words discussing the way my life granted the narrative extra (unfair?) power. I don’t blame the reviewers, for Darger had printed a full-page author biography at the front of the book in addition to the more conventional capsule biography below my photo on the cover’s back flap. Not to say I blame Darger, either. Their stated mission, after all, was to provide a platform for “outsiders,” so it only made sense that they’d have wanted anything that could testify to that mission’s fulfillment to be as prominently displayed as possible. However, the message they were going for (something along the lines of “Our authors may be mentally ill, but that doesn’t mean they can’t write great novels!”) unfortunately came across, at least in my case, as “Seeing as the author of this book is mentally ill, we invite you to admire the ways in which this thing he calls a good novel actually resembles, at times, a good novel.”
Then again, maybe I’m being paranoid and needy, or I’m just less talented at receiving compliments than I should be. Possibly just less talented in general. Still, I couldn’t help but notice how often the reviewers quoted from the bio, especially from the paragraph that stated, “In the wake of a pair of arrests, at age twelve, for trespassing and destruction of property, Magnet took part in the Graham&Swords/University of Chicago Friends Study, the seminal research (and development) project that aimed—purportedly—to examine the therapeutic effects of companion animals on children diagnosed with psychotic disorders. He was one of a handful of the study’s subjects to be given what, at that time, was still called a Botimal; he was one of the first people in the world to own a Curio.”
I do recognize that, apart from my proximity to the Pellmore-Jasons, my having been in that study is, to the general reader, likely the most interesting aspect of my life, and, as you’ll see, I will describe it—in this book—soon enough, but No Please Don’t has no more to do with cures or studies than it does with swingsets, childhood psychosis, or encounters with North American royalty. It’s not about me at all, but a boy—and later a man—called Gil in search of a lost and beloved action figure. If you ever get to read it, I hope you’ll remember that.
* * *
Have you published anything since No Please Don’t?
In fact, I haven’t. Mostly for lack of trying, but also—a little bit—for success at failing. Since publishing No Please Don’t, I’ve completed seven short stories, two novellas, and a novel, and all of them, I think, are likable, but none of them can stand beside NPD, which I hope is great (only time can tell greatness, but I have a feeling; NPD is the one work of fiction I’ve written that I’m able to imagine—even seven years after its publication, now—that I’d fall in love with were someone other than me to have written it), and because the paltry advance (if any at all) I’d receive for these merely likable works wouldn’t be enough to get me out of my father’s house, and because to publish fiction that’s anything less than potentially great could as easily thwart as benefit NPD’s chances of being reprinted, I never bothered submitting them to publishers or magazines.