So that covers my lack of trying.
As for my failure, I did once try to publish a short work of nonfiction that I think is quite good. My journals aside, it’s the only work of nonfiction I’ve written other than the one you’re currently reading, and I wrote it, quite reluctantly at first, only because my editor at Darger, in the months leading up to No Please Don’t’s publication, went out of his way to interest a friend of his at Harper’s—a junior editor—in me. For those of you readers who don’t closely follow the publishing industry, one of the things a fiction writer is supposed to do when that fiction writer has a book of fiction coming out is try, in the weeks preceding his book of fiction’s publication, to publish as much nonfiction in periodicals as he possibly can in the hopes his nonfiction will entice those who read it to read his forthcoming fiction. If successful at all, writers usually end up publishing one or two newspaper book reviews, but occasionally they publish personal essays that relate in some way to the subject of their forthcoming fiction, and that, my editor at Darger told me, was the sort of nonfiction Harper’s wanted from me; they wanted, he said, an essay on my childhood. They wanted that, I reasoned all on my own, because a full half of NPD takes place during its protagonist Gil MacCabby’s childhood.
As I said, I was at first reluctant to accept the assignment—I just wasn’t that interested in writing nonfiction—but soon I came to realize that if I didn’t do everything I could to increase the likelihood that my novel would be read, I’d hate myself later.
I settled on a subject rather quickly: a memorable night I once spent as a boy at the house of an aged, middle-tier Chicagoland gangster. To my surprise, I quite enjoyed writing it.
Three weeks and it was finished. I went to Kinko’s and faxed it over to my editor at Darger. A couple hours later, he called me at home and said he loved the essay, but didn’t think it was what his friend at Harper’s wanted. His friend wanted, he said, an essay about my time in the Friends Study. He’d thought I’d understood that. I asked him how he thought I could have understood that, since the Friends Study had nothing to do with No Please Don’t; plus how did his friend even know about my time in the Friends Study? His friend knew, he said, because he’d pitched him on my bio. I’d assumed he’d shown him my novel, I said. His friend didn’t have any time to read novels, he said, and his friend, truth be told, he said, didn’t seem to like novels. What he’d liked was my bio, so…
My editor sent my essay in anyway. Why not at least give it a try? was the reasoning. It was good, after all, and therefore his friend might—should—want to publish it regardless of what it was about.
A few weeks later, his friend rejected it nicely, said that he’d enjoyed it, but had trouble believing in the boy-me I depicted—too reflective too young, not childlike enough—plus it didn’t fit the issue for this or that reason. I was welcome, the friend said, to try again with a piece about my time in the Friends Study, but I’d need to have it finished by the end of the week if I wanted a shot at getting it into the issue that would come out the month of No Please Don’t’s publication. It was already Wednesday afternoon at that point, and, having gotten my hopes up about being in Harper’s, I was now too deflated to conceive, much less deliver, a whole new piece in under forty-eight hours. There just wasn’t any way.
When I explained this situation to my father, he clapped me on the shoulder and said I should ask my editor at Darger to collect me my kill fee, so that’s what I did. My editor at Darger said I wasn’t owed a kill fee; kill fees were for writers who’d been contracted to write articles the contracting magazine eventually rejected, whereas I was but a writer who’d been granted a friendly invitation to submit.
“Well, shit,” my dad said, when I reported to him my editor’s response. “I guess it’s best to just roll with the punch, then. Focus on the book. You’re publishing a book! Better yet: fuck that. Unfocus on all of it. Come on out with me. Brothel. My treat. Let’s go.”
I thanked him and declined to go to the brothel, taking, instead, his first piece of advice: to focus on the book. I thought: “I’m a novelist. Whether or not I publish a personal essay has nothing meaningful to do with that.”
And I started, then and there, to work on a brand-new novel—the one I decided, eventually, wasn’t good enough to publish—and, for the most part, I forgot about the essay.
It wasn’t til I started doing “research” for this memoir (mostly rereading journals and newspaper clippings, staring at old photos, watching old movies) that I again read the essay, at which point I determined it possessed no small amount of relevance to this memoir—not just because I’ve spent some thousandish words describing it in the course of answering the question “Have you published anything since No Please Don’t?” but because it’ll help me answer the question that follows it, here in the “About the Author” chapter—and so, I’ve decided to include it below.
The Magnets, the Birds, and the Balls
(June 2006)
When I was six, or maybe seven years old, my parents, for their seventh or eighth anniversary, spent a Friday night at a downtown hotel, and left me in the care of my father’s mother, my Grandmother Magnet. As my father told it, Grandma Magnet had agreed a full month in advance to stay the Friday night at our house in Wheelatine, but then, on the Saturday prior to their getaway (though my parents wouldn’t learn of this til after their return), she and her mahjong pals had thrown aside their tiles in favor of an outing to Arlington Racecourse, where Grandma’d met Salvatore “Sally the Balls” DiBoccerini, with whom she was instantly stricken by the thunderbolt, and from whom she had, purportedly (there wasn’t any ring, and the ostensible engagement was called off inside a fortnight), accepted a hasty proposal of marriage.
Had I heard of Sally the Balls? she asked me, beaming, as we drove to the Balls’s house in her LeSabre. I had no idea we were going to his house—after seeing my parents off, we’d packed me a bag for a “surprise, secret overnight” at what I’d nonsensically hoped would be Disney World—nor had I heard of Sally the Balls, but, given her tone, it seemed like I should have heard of Sally the Balls, so I told her I might have heard of Sally the Balls. She told me that she didn’t know what I’d heard, but she’d heard of some things that other people had said, and I asked her what things other people had said, and she said those things were not worth repeating, and she wanted me to know, in case those were also the things that I’d heard, that those things were false, and that there wasn’t any good reason at all to think Sally the Balls was anything less than a wonderful man. It was true, she told me, that when the Balls was younger, he’d had some friends who had gotten him in trouble, and that was why, ever since 1970, he hadn’t set foot inside Chicago city limits, and it was one of the reasons he didn’t like to leave Cicero if he didn’t have to, which was why we, ourselves, were going to Cicero—but the past was the past, was the past not the past? And I asked her how the past could not be the past and I asked her if Cicero was close to Disney World. She said that I’d hit the nail on the head regarding the past, said the past could by no means fail to be the past, and as far as Cicero went, it was the best of all suburbs, I was going to love Cicero, Disney World compared to Cicero was nothing. And I asked her if the reason they called the Balls the Balls was because the Balls was good at lots of different sports, and she said maybe that was it, though she couldn’t say for sure, and if she had to guess, he was probably good at sports, or at least used to be: he was getting old for sports, now, was nearly seventy. And I suggested that maybe he was the owner of a sports team, like probably not the Cubs or the Bears or the Bulls because all those teams were inside Chicago where he wouldn’t set foot because of when he was young, but maybe there was also a Cicero team that I hadn’t ever heard of? And she said that, no, the Balls didn’t own teams but probably he’d be good at owning teams if he owned them; what he did own was a club, at least in part; he co-owned a club at which pretty girls danced, and he was good at co-owning it, did well for himself, made lots of money, and so did the dancers, and some people looked down on that, but where did they get off? I didn’t know where they got off, and I told her as much. I said I liked pretty girls, and liked to see them dance, and she said that was because I was a red-blooded boy, just like my father’d been, just like the Balls had been, and each of them had grown up, as would I grow up, to be a red-blooded man, which was the best kind of man. I asked her what other kinds of blooded people there were, and she gave it some thought, then told me that people were all kinds of blooded, and the worst kind of all the kinds of blooded were the blue because of how they looked down their long, thin noses at boys like me and men like my father and men like the Balls, and the worst part about them was how some of the uncommon things they did were made out to be interesting, and sometimes even good, but when the red-blooded did those same kinds of uncommon things, they were made out to be strange, and sometimes even bad, like for instance the Balls had some uncommon ways, and if the Balls were blue-blooded then the word the blue-blooded would use to describe him would be “eccentric,” but since the Balls’s blood was red, the blue-blooded called him less generous words. I asked what kind of words. She said she wouldn’t repeat them. I asked her again. She told me shut my piehole about the kinds of words. She told me take a hint, she was getting annoyed. I hadn’t wanted to annoy her, I had only been curious, she needed to see that all I was was just curious, so to show curiosity I asked what kind of uncommon ways the Balls had that would be eccentric if he were blue-blooded, and she said she’d already told me a couple—didn’t like to leave Cicero, had some troublesome friends, owned part of a club where pretty girls danced—but the main one, she said, was that he loved exotic birds, and he kept some as pets, and he called them his fids, which was short for “feathered kids,” and when he did leave Cicero, he missed his fids the way some parents miss their children, which was, she thought, very sweet of the Balls, something that suggested he possessed soulful depths, wouldn’t I say? I told her I would. Her annoyance abated.