After the Workshop

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ghosts of Chicago
(stories), 2008

 

 

America’s Report Card
(novel), 2006

 

 

The Book of Ralph
(novel), 2004

 

 

Troublemakers
(stories), 2000

—WILLIAM LASHNER

I
WAS A MEDIA ESCORT.

That was how, twelve years after graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I was earning my keep. I worked freelance, negotiating my fees with publicists at the major publishing houses, but I was occasionally thrown work by a woman named Barbara Rizzo, who had escorts waiting, like operatives, all across the country.

My duties?

I picked up writers, novelists mostly, from the Cedar Rapids Airport, drove them to Iowa City, dropped them off at the hotel, took them to their various media interviews, made sure they arrived at their book signings on time, and then drove them back to the airport the next day. If they wanted, I would join them for dinner or drinks (all of which I would bill to the publisher), but this rarely happened. Most writers, exhausted by early flights and bloated itineraries, were happy enough to hole up in the hotel and order room service—that is, until the next time they needed me to take them somewhere, even if the destination was a block away.

The only time I ever met other media escorts was at BookExpo America, the annual conference at which nearly every publisher, large and small, launched their forthcoming books to the world; and every year at the BEA, way off in one of the far-flung corners of the convention center, the media escorts announced their annual Bull’s-Eye Award.
The Bull’s-Eye was given to the author who had been the biggest pain in the ass to escort. The original idea was to hold a mock-award ceremony during which a laminated shooting range target would be unveiled, with a photo of the author’s head glued atop the silhouetted torso, but this proposal was wisely nixed. The name of the award—the Bull’s-Eye—stuck, however. Naturally, the winning author would never be informed of his or her honor.

One year the award was given to a feminist icon who terrorized all her media escorts, mostly middle-aged women, and referred to them, regardless of age, as “girl.” Another year it went to one of the hip young writers—his first book has a title too long for me ever to remember it correctly—for making absurd requests, such as the time he insisted that the bookstore play a recording of humpback whales during his event, or how he refused to give anyone, even the poor schlub driving him around, a straight answer.

“I have pancreatic cancer,” he told one escort in St. Louis named Marissa, whose own father had recently died of a malignant brain tumor. “I have only ten weeks to live,” he continued, remaining poker-faced, “so please don’t mess up anything tonight, okay? I want this to be a special event.”

The Bull’s-Eye Award was Barbara Rizzo’s very own creation. I liked Barbara, but whenever I worked for her, she would harangue me for not owning a cell phone (“You need to go out there today and get a cell phone. Will you do that for me? Tell me you’ll do that for me!”), or for not having a better network of contacts in Iowa City (“What do you mean you don’t know a good masseuse?”), or for not owning a bigger car (“When are you going to upgrade, Jack? Have you seen the new Hummers? You really should take the day off and go look at the Hummers, Jack.”). She sent out frequent lists of dos and don’ts. The dos included, among other things, vacuuming your car before picking
up a client, shaving (for men), and wearing pantyhose and a skirt (for women). The don’ts list specified that we shouldn’t tell the authors our problems (“Don’t get personal with the clients!”), we shouldn’t ask to borrow money from them for parking (“Always bring change for meters!”), and that we were never, under any circumstances, to engage in any form of sexual activity with a client (“We’re not THAT kind of escort service!”).

Over time, I broke nearly every “do” and “don’t” on Barbara’s list, culminating with the night I did shots of Absolut with Sherry LaGris, author of
Planet Penis
, a best-selling book about the male-centric world we live in. We ended up in her hotel room, in her bed, and we had sex—drunken sex that included me getting poked in my right eye with an elbow and Sherry falling head-first off the bed during one of my more enthusiastic thrusts—and yet all appeared as though it were going to be okay (that rarest of things: an uncomplicated fling) until she confessed that I was the first man she’d slept with since her husband of twenty-five years had walked out on her for her negative (“But honest!” she insisted) portrayal of him in her book. Naked, slightly woozy, I tried to comfort her. “Now, now,” I kept saying. “Everything’s going to be all right.” The next morning, our clothes reeking of cigarette smoke and sweat, Sherry perfunctorily signed my copy of
Planet Penis
on our way to the airport. “Good wishes,” she wrote and scribbled her name. I made sure she got through security without a hitch, but only after I had borrowed five bucks for airport parking.

Fortunately, Barbara Rizzo never found out about this particular breach of protocol, and she even invited me to attend the BEA in Chicago, all expenses paid, for providing the best anecdote about that year’s Bull’s-Eye Award winner, Maria Castaneda. Maria Castaneda, best known for her derivative magical realist novels, was the darling of multicultural studies across America. Her books were assigned in
hundreds of courses on Latino/Latina literature, courses on feminist theory, and courses about both “real” and “imagined” borders, whatever that meant. She commanded large speaking fees and had even convinced her publisher to bring out a book of her poetry, a slim volume titled
You Seek Answers to Questions I Have Not Heard
.

In order to win the Bull’s-Eye Award, you needed to garner the most votes, and in that particular year, Maria Castaneda won it hands down. According to the other escorts, she had been dismissive of the groups of young girls, mostly Latinas, who came out to see her (“Cheerleaders,” she called them, rolling her eyes); she had berated bookstore workers for not recognizing her upon sight, and then mumbled insults under her breath when these same workers, after learning who she was, didn’t treat her with the proper reverence; she insulted their cities (“This sure is an ugly place. Where am I again?”); she barked orders at her media escorts and then, like a family pet, curled up in their backseats for naps, no matter the distances they were driving; she made at least two media escorts come to her hotel room and massage her feet.

At BookExpo, in front of a small crowd of media escorts, along with a few curious passersby, Barbara Rizzo stood in front of a microphone and eloquently enumerated the long list of complaints filed against Castaneda. Rizzo read the list as though it were a string of accomplishments, encouraging her escorts to applaud after each deed. And then Barbara called me up to the microphone to tell my story.

My grievance was, in the larger scheme of things, a small one: Maria Castaneda wanted me to take off my baseball cap while I was in her presence. Since Barbara Rizzo herself wouldn’t have approved of the baseball cap, I revised my complaint, claiming that she berated me for not wearing a tie and insisted that I wear one the next time she saw me. I wasn’t comfortable with my modified anecdote, so I hurried quickly through it, taking listeners up to the point where I had
finally—gratefully—dropped Maria Castaneda off at the airport, wishing her a safe flight to her next destination.

“But when I got home,” I said, “I decided to look up all her books on Amazon. And that’s when the idea came to me. I spent the next ten or so hours setting up different accounts, using all the credit cards I owned, so that I could log on ten negative reviews for each of her books. And then I emailed all my friends to do the same. By the end of the day, Maria Castaneda’s books each averaged one-and-a-half stars!”

My fellow escorts roared; they were eating it up.

“And then I started leaving comments about her every time I found a blog that mentioned her,” I continued. And I was about to regale the audience with some of the nastier comments I had left on blogs, many of which were libelous, when I saw Barbara Rizzo peering warily up at me, and I remembered that I hadn’t told her this part of the story. Some of the other escorts were giving me looks that suggested I’d pushed my reprisal a little too far, so I quickly wrapped up my speech.

“Just a few blogs,” I added, shaking my head. “Nothing too awful.”

My speech petered out here, and I stepped away from the microphone, but as I climbed down from the small platform, I saw Maria Castaneda. Arms crossed, she stood at the back of the crowd, glaring at me. Was it really her?

“Look, look,” I said out of the corner of my mouth to the people closest to me, “she’s here. I think it’s her, at least.” But no one paid any attention. I was either speaking too softly, or everyone was embarrassed for me. Had I gone too far? I wondered. Was I a terrible person?

The next time I looked, Maria Castaneda was gone, swallowed by the herd of anonymous conventioneers—or perhaps, like a character from one of her own novels, she had stormed out of the building and, buoyed by humiliation, floated up through the earth’s atmosphere, never to be seen again.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

M
OST PEOPLE FAIL to recognize the moment they’ve touched the ceiling of their potential, that point at which they’ve reached the height of their intellectual prowess or the summit of their popularity. It can happen anywhere, at any point in their life—away at college during a study session the night before a final, or on a high school football field while catching the game-winning touchdown. For some poor souls it happens as early as grade school, often inconspicuously: surrounded by friends on the blacktop on the first day back to school, or saying something funny in class that makes even the teacher smile. And then, after that, it’s all downhill.