Meet Me at the Extraction Point

Lotto fever, commercial novels, day jobs and the cost of day dreams

Let’s talk about day dreams.

About ten years ago, I was having a tough time. An old friend had recently finished a drawn-out death by alcoholism. I was priced out of my home of 16 years. I went through six months of a frustrating job search that landed me at an insurance company.

The job was a step down in terms of money and personal freedom. I had a 90-minute commute to and from Jersey City on either side of the workday. There were no escapades on the D trains. I didn’t want to be there. And I couldn’t find a way out.

What virtues the job did have, I wasn’t counting them at the time. The main one was that I was left alone. The workday, though, was an unkind mirror.

“You must not, can not, want what you want,”

I remember that phrase. I think it’s William Burroughs. I hear his nasal rasp when I think of it. At the time, it was a scab I kept scratching throughout my day at work.

Each workday was the existence of a person I couldn't be bothered to inquire about. I passed through the open-plan office so as not to be seen. I made no friends. Every step into the PATH train, off the PATH train and into the office was a reminder of just how badly I’d failed at whatever it was I’d hoped to do or become.

Maybe I could’ve endured the experience with more humor, humility and grace. But I didn’t. I endured it. Sound dramatic? Sure, fine. We all dramatize our own lives just to stay interested. But that trick had turned on me, badly, to the extent that I couldn’t just transcend or reason my way out of it.

The word in the elevator

With so much solitude in uncomfortable surroundings, I became highly sensitive to Jersey City and its passions. People in Jersey City loved the lotto. It was the main conversation in the elevators, even in the office. A current pulsed through the place when a Powerball jackpot bubbled toward the half-billion mark.

There’s not much to say about the lotto - you lose, or you win. But it was a happy thought to return to, so return they did, in meandering, pointless chat. They had ideas about what a good lotto number would be. I hated hearing about it. I despised the people who talked about it.

Worse than lotto?

I despised them, in part, because I was lying to myself. At the time, I was playing another kind of lotto - the kind you really can’t play if you think of it as a lotto.

I had a novel, but not just any novel. It was, I believed, a commercial novel (See “Anyone Dumb Enough to Write a Novel” this summer).

You can’t win if you don’t play

There are ways to win the lottery. A few years back, a mathematician started an investment fund that won it a dozen times. Whitey Bulger claimed multiple jackpots by scaring the hell out of lotto winners in South Boston.

Winning the lottery, however, can mean losing everywhere else. The history of lottery winners is a sad one, with many of them dead or broke soon after winning. The chance operation of the lotto drawing isn’t the only treacherous mystery in play.

Outcomes

Life has a way of dragging on, muddling through, without a result, without an outcome, except that you get older. And soon enough, that stops being a victory.

The great thing about any game is that it has a result - winner and a loser. With a hand of blackjack or a spin of the reels in a slot machine, you quickly discover how it all turned out. You get to find out what shadowy chance, possibly even G-d, thinks of you. But the excitement is in finding out. The knowledge is hollow. It doesn’t add up to anything. You have to find out all over again, right now.

Who is the market?

So there I was, all alone in a mixed-use office tower atop a dying mall full of pretzel smell and the landfill-reinforced former Jersey railhead, grinding my teeth, preparing to unleash my commercial novel on the world.

For background, commercial novels are books of fiction aimed squarely at the center-mass of the market.

There’s a scene in Kill Bill where the bad guy gives a monologue about how Clark Kent was actually Superman’s informed critique of humanity - weak, bumbling, slow-witted, easily flustered, lacking confidence and grace. I had something like this attitude toward the market.

I decided the market wanted sex, violence and politics. I figured they really wanted sexual and political violence, or political and violent sex, or possibly even violent and sexual politics. In my commercial novel, I gave them all three, tied together with a ribbon of demonic possession. As far as the market goes, I don’t think I was that far off. Our reigning blockbuster of the moment is essentially a luxury screensaver held together with sexually violent politics.

In my commercial novel, I even threw in a murder-suicide on the 50-yard line of the Super Bowl, in case the market suspected me of holding back.

A home-made lottery ticket

By the time I’d been relegated to Jersey City, the commercial novel was ready. It had been long-listed for an award that no longer exists. A kindly older agent who’d been pitching it to publishers had retired a few months before my exile to Jersey City. In practical terms, that pretty much extinguished the book’s immediate prospects.

I decided to take it to the market myself. So I hired a designer I knew to work on a nice cover - appropriately, a slot machine - then hired proofreaders and someone to format the interior, and started spreading the word. I did a Kickstarter for presales and to drum up interest, and then launched the book.

You can’t lose if you don’t play

Weeks passed. And one afternoon in Jersey City ten years ago, it became absolutely clear to me that my new, commercial book would not relieve me of my hateful employment, or restore the carefree ways of my youth, or deliver me into a more comfortable station in life.

There would be no deliverance, no extraction from this hostile country. It was a bad day.

I left the office and walked to the Hudson River, with a sensation like a small implosion behind my sternum. I remember my eyes blurring. I couldn’t focus as I stared into the PATH train tunnel. Three trains later, I made it home and spent the next three days in bed.

When asked about my absence, I told a coworker - a much older Brooklyn spinster - that my back went out. She told me about her own bad back, and the famous doctor who finally got her out of bed after eighteen months on disability. The doctor, in his book, said all bad backs are caused by repressed rage.

The cost of daydreams

When the people in those Jersey City elevators don’t win the lottery, they say they’re not surprised. That’s not entirely honest, or else they wouldn’t have bought the ticket. The dream you buy for a dollar is still a dream. A dream - in the sense of a desire strung on a possibility, however tenuous - is more than a fantasy.

And a dream - in the sense of a deeply held aspiration - is also a solemn vow made to oneself, often against all known likelihood, sometimes against the entire world. And when so serious a promise is broken, someone has to pay. Otherwise, either the promise meant nothing, or the person making the promise never meant anything.

In the case of my novel ten years ago, or the novel a few months ago, the person who paid was me. It was a rough couple weeks, maybe months, in both cases.

“You think you’d know better by now,”

is what you’d say to a lifelong gambler.

My friend said it to me the other day, after a few drinks. It was a week before Christmas, and he was in town on a whim. I’d been complaining how my latest book had failed to relieve me of my need to show up for work every morning, or or deliver my family into a more comfortable station in life. We had a laugh.

Rain delays

Events have no natural ending. Outcomes only exist within well-defined games. My commercial novel never made much money - maybe two months’ rent over the course of ten years. It was number 1,684,465 on Amazon’s best seller list, last I checked.

But it isn’t a failure, exactly. It’s my second-most reviewed book. And some of the things in it have even come to pass - foreign interference in U.S. politics, disgraced spyware billionaires, the secession movement in certain states, and NFL games being played in empty stadiums.

And one fantastic night I did a reading from the book to a full house at the late, great St. Mark’s Books. That’s something no one will ever get to do again. Maybe the book didn’t win like I wanted. But it didn’t entirely lose (See “‘It’s Great You’re Still Doing That’ Revisited” next week).

Putting in a bet

The joy of gambling, when there is joy, is in defying the fear that defines the rest of your life.

When a bet’s in play, you trust your money to your own probably nonexistent magic powers. The more you bet, the more faith you’re placing in those powers. Hell, you’ll throw the fucking money away. You’re bigger than money and bigger than fear - a nice thing to believe. What wouldn’t you pay to believe it for a short while?

With you create something, the bet is time, energy and emotion. That energy could’ve been spent on the pursuit of health, wealth, personal relationships or just general pleasure. Art is a pretext for declaring that you’re bigger than all of that, at least for a moment, win or lose.

Selected bibliography

The commercial novel, WINDFALL

The latest book that’s failed to pan out like I hoped, The Reign of the Anti-Santas