How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(35)
You smiled and forgave him for four or five “bro’s” too many.
Later that night, Bobbie, the perfect agent/fine sister, called from a 212 number and asked you to send her the other pieces you were working on. By 8:00 p.m., you’d sent her the book Brandon wanted, another novel, and a rough draft of some essays you’d been working on. By 3:00 a.m., she emailed you and said, “We want you. You’re the second person I’ve said this to in five years, but I think you could change the trajectory of African-American contemporary literature. You’ve got the makings of what Brandon calls, ‘a real black writer.’ I’m so excited about the new projects you’re working on. If you sign with Chatham Ward, we’ll have our lawyers get you out of the deal with Nathalie in the next week or so and Brandon says he can get us half the advance in three weeks. I’ll be in touch.”
You never contacted Nathalie, but a few days later, Bobbie, the perfect agent/fine sister did. “Nathalie is so fucking pissed,” she said a few days later, “but all’s fair in love, war, and business.” As you wondered whether this was love, war, or business, you and your perfect agent/fine sister waited and waited and waited for Brandon to deliver.
Six months later, three months after your initial publication date of June 2009, Brandon offered you substantially less money than he had promised and a publication date a year later than the one he verbally agreed to.
“Pardon me for saying this,” your perfect agent said over the phone from a different 212 number, “but Brandon Farley is a bona fide bitch-ass nigga for fucking us out of thousands of dollars and pushing the pub date back to June 2011. He’s just not professional. I’m wondering if this was just some ploy to get you away from KenteKloth. He’s been trying to take all his authors away from them as a way of fucking the company.”
“I don’t get it,” you said, shamefully exicted that your agent had used “fuck,” “bitch-ass,” and “nigga” in one conversation.
“So Brandon acquired this wonderful list of new literary black authors at KenteKloth, and they were all going to work with Nathalie after he was basically fired from the company. Nathalie and the house were going to get credit for a lot of his work. Do you get it now? We got caught up in some something really nasty.”
You finally got your first edit letter from Brandon Farley the following July. In addition to telling you that the tone of the piece was far too dark and that you needed an obvious redemptive ending, Brandon wrote, “There’s way too much racial politics in this piece, bro. You’re writing to a multicultural society, but you’re not writing multiculturally.”
You wondered out loud what writing “multiculturally” actually meant and what kind of black man would write the word “bro” in an email.
“Bro, we need this book to come down from 284 pages to 150,” he said. “We’re going to have to push the pub date back again, too. I’m thinking June 2012. Remember,” he wrote, “It’s business. I think you should start from scratch but keep the spirit. Does the narrator really need to be a black boy? Does the story really need to take place in Mississippi? The Percy Jackson demographic,” he wrote. “That’s a big part of the audience for your novel. Read it over the weekend. Real black writers adjust to the market, bro, at least for their first novels.”
By the time you found out Percy Jackson wasn’t the name of a conflicted black boy from Birmingham, but a fake-ass Harry Potter who saved the gods of Mount Olympus, you were already broken. Meanwhile, someone you claimed to love told you that you were letting your publishing failure turn you into a monster. She said that you were becoming the kind of human being you had always despised. You defended yourself against the truth and, really, against responsibility, as American monsters and American murderers tend to do, and you tried to make this person feel as absolutely worthless, confused, and malignant as you felt. Later that night, you couldn’t sleep, and instead of diving back into the fiction, for the first time in your life, you wrote the sentence, “I’ve been slowly killing myself and others close to me, just like my uncle.”
Something else was wrong, too. Your body no longer felt like your body, and you doubted whether your grandma would ever see your work before one of you died.
Two years after the original scheduled publication date for your first book, there was still no book. Questions fell like dominoes. Why would Brandon buy the book, you kept asking yourself. Why would that bitch-ass nigga get you out of a contract for a book he didn’t want, your perfect agent kept asking you. Why’d you promise stuff you couldn’t deliver, you asked Brandon on the phone.
“The book doesn’t just have Duck Duck Goose’s name on it,” you told him, slightly aware of what happens when keeping it real goes wrong. “My name is on that shit, too. That means, on some level, it ain’t business. I feel like you want me to lie. I read and write for a living, Brandon. I see the shit that’s out there. I’ve read your other books. I see your goofy book covers looking like greasy children’s menus at Applebee’s. I ain’t putting my name on a fucking greasy Applebee’s menu. I’m not. Don’t front like it’s about quality. You, and maybe your editorial board, don’t think you can sell this book because you don’t believe black Southern audiences read literary shit. And that’s fine. Maybe you’re right. If you didn’t believe in it, why buy it in the first place? Look, I can create an audience for this novel with these essays I’ve been writing,” you tell him. “It sounds stupid, but I can. I just need to know that you’re committed to really publishing this book. Do you believe in the vision or not?”