Lust & Wonder

 

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

Thank you for buying this

St. Martin's Press ebook.

 

To receive special offers, bonus content,

and info on new releases and other great reads,

sign up for our newsletters.

 

Or visit us online at

us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

 

For email updates on the author, click
here
.

 

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

 

For Crsripley

 

I

 

Just when I broke my sobriety and started drinking again in moderate and controlled measure exactly like a normal person, I met this guy who wasn't just a guy but a writer, and not just a writer but the author of one of my favorite books.

In AA, you are brainwashed into believing that all the good stuff happens only after you stop drinking. Clearly they are lying; my life improved significantly as soon as I ordered a cocktail.

Our meeting was very romantic, at least by the gay standards of the mid-1990s. Which is to say not at a gym or in the midst of a spiraling blackout but through fan mail. I sent him a note:

Dear Mitch,

Let me just say right off that I am not Kathy Bates in
Misery
. I do not have a double-headed axe or a criminal record. In fact, I was at my friend's apartment and saw a copy of your most recent book on his shelf. I pointed to it and said, “Isn't that the sickest, most wonderful novel, ever?” He explained that he hadn't actually read it but that you and he had gone out on a date six months ago and, for whatever reason, it just didn't work out. Which is how I got your e-mail address. I probably sound crazy, like a stalker. Like a “fan.” But I'm really very normal, stable, healthy, and maybe even a little bit boring. If you're interested, write me back. I'm attaching a photo I took of myself just five minutes ago. And yeah, I do own shirts.

He replied almost instantly, like he'd been expecting to hear from me. “I'd love to meet you,” he wrote. “You look great!”

The swiftness and brevity of his reply caused me to instantly resent him. I felt deprived of suspense and the luxurious anxiety of wondering if I'd made a fool of myself by attaching a shirtless photo with my stalker note.

Now he was the dish of wrapped peppermints next to the cash register that I didn't want because they were free.

Because his reply to my note expressed only his desire to meet me along with a compliment, I almost felt like I could have achieved the same result by sending no words at all; just the shirtless photo of me standing on my shabby terrace. It was even possible he had looked at my picture and then merely skimmed my carefully crafted e-mail.

And while it was true that I was working out for two hours every day so that I could have the kind of body that inspires in others a sickening feeling of jealousy and inferiority, it was also true that I, myself, looked down on people with such bodies and felt myself vastly superior to them. I would simply never date somebody with a body like mine; they would be too vapid.

I made-believe I didn't feel this way by once again studying the author photo on the back cover of his book.
But he's so handsome. And he's published!
These two qualities, when combined, seemed to detonate any developing sense of doubt.

Besides, just the fact that he
had
an author photo was enough.

I understood that I was clearly insane. But he apparently hadn't picked up on how many times in one short letter I asserted that I was
not
. This acceptance of my questionable mental health made me feel confident that we would be compatible, possibly for life.

I wrote him back right away and suggested we meet that very evening.

The restaurant where we met was located between our two apartments in the East Village and featured a great deal of pale-blue neon in the window, which stained us as we sat in our booth.

We each ordered a vodka martini, and he automatically offered me his olive, which I read as a very good sign. Olives are the wishbones of the cocktail world; rarely are they freely passed along to somebody else.

He blushed and averted his eyes when I praised his novel, seeming genuinely uncomfortable. This caused me to fawn even more, which in turn made him down the rest of his martini and signal the waiter for another.

It was a strangely powerful feeling to watch my words of praise disassemble his composure like that. Which is probably why I continued and elaborated in multiple directions by saying, “I love that you have a cleft chin,” and “I think you look even better in person than in your author photo.”

He asked about me, and I gave him a slightly sanitized version. “Well, I've been an advertising copywriter since I was nineteen. I'm freelance now, which is better because it's forced me to care less, and for some reason, this has improved the quality of my work.”

I left out the fact that I'd been shoved into rehab a year and a half before because I was such a disaster, always missing meetings or showing up to them drunk, which was even worse.

When Mitch asked me about my family, I took a sip from my drink and said, “I've never been very close to them.”

I had long ago learned not to unload all of my sordid past on somebody during the first date. I had done this very thing in the past, and it hadn't worked out well. When people find out your mother was mentally ill, your father was a chronic alcoholic, and you spent most of your childhood being raised by your parents' eccentric and possibly insane psychiatrist in his run-down mental hospital of a house, they tend to back away. In order to make them lean in and want more, I had to polish certain elements from my life, while omitting others entirely.

“My mother was a poet,” I told him, leaving out the fact that she was a poet on antipsychotic medications and had been hospitalized throughout my childhood.

Mitch didn't press me for additional details about my family. The only thing he wanted to know was, “How did you get into advertising at nineteen?”

I told him, “I was living in San Francisco,” as though that would explain everything. Which, actually, it did.

*   *   *

Just before turning eighteen, I moved to Boston with the money I'd saved from being a Ground Round waiter, enrolling in a computer programming trade school called Control Data Institute. Just before I graduated nine months later, I saw the most hideous, downscale daytime TV commercial for my own school. It made me realize that I was most certainly not at MIT.

I was so mortified.

I thought,
Somebody thought of that. It came into their head, and they said, “Yeah.”

I realized I could think of a better ad than that one without even trying. Then to prove it to myself, I sat down with the only magazine in the apartment—a copy of
Fortune
that belonged to my roommate—and going page by page, I rewrote every ad in it.

The only paper I had to type on was the blank side of my programming flowchart paper from school, so I used that. As a result, my first “portfolio” was pink.

Then, because I didn't know (or care) any better, I started to call advertising agencies in Boston, asking if I could come in and show them my ads.

Every ad agency I contacted agreed to meet with me. That blew me away.

But the result was the same each time: humiliation. One creative director sneered, “Um, ads have visuals? Not just words. Your spelling is just horrendous. And why do you have commas all over the place?”

It didn't help that my portfolio case was a paper bag. I was broke.

I was also totally over computer programming school. I cheated my way through the rest of it—not because it was difficult but because I needed to spend my coding time writing pretend ads for my ever-expanding portfolio.

Because now that I had decided on advertising, I was determined.

Each day, I would walk the four miles from where I was staying into Boston's business district. I didn't care about my feet. I didn't need a drink of water; the sweat would eventually evaporate, and I would eat something when I got home.

All that mattered was advertising. I had to get in.

Advertising came naturally to me. I could write fifty ads for the same can of tuna. What I didn't know was if even one of those ads was any good.

I was starting to worry the answer might be no. I'd arranged interviews with a dozen agencies, which I now knew were called “shops,” and I couldn't shake the feeling that to most people, I was kind of an eccentric joke. Definitely not a copywriter.

The problem was, there were only a couple of agencies I'd failed to meet with. I was running out of options.

Then a creative director at one of these last-on-the-list ad agencies told me this: “Half of the words in this portfolio are incorrectly spelled. You overuse commas. These ads themselves look terrible, like each one has been touched by dozens of dirty hands. And there are about thirty ads too many here. It's good that you have range, but you can still demonstrate that with twelve to fifteen ads, total. And here's my last comment, and it's the big one.”

I had long, curly hair and wore sunglasses twenty-four hours a day. I had a hoop earring like a pirate. I wore extremely baggy, deconstructed clothing at a time when the rest of the world was into zippers and Spandex. And I had now met with practically every agency in Boston and even a bunch of the stores, looking for something in-house.

This guy had been my last chance.

And here he was, just layering on “no” in a hundred different ways. I wanted to evaporate, not just leave his office. I didn't want any more of his words on me.

He leaned forward and looked at me with a strange intensity. It made me stop fidgeting, and it made me keep looking at him. But most of all, that gaze of his made me listen.

He said, “I understand that you may have limited finances, but let me tell you something. If you are going to walk into my office with a paper bag filled with ads—not even an inexpensive black portfolio case like you could pick up in Harvard Square for twelve bucks but a plain old brown paper bag—if you have the nerve to do that? Then the ads inside that paper bag had just better be the best ads I have ever seen in my life.”

Well, he was right.

There was nothing I could say to him, because he was just right.

It didn't matter that I could never afford to spend twelve dollars on something that was not then digested. He was right. I was wrong.