In The Mood

On this July morning with the family asleep I trundle down the stairs, literary ideas in tow, and catch this scene out of the bathroom window. Ah, 5 am is pastoral. Dewy grass, the first calls from the neighborhood birds and the unsullied perfumes of the garden are the rewards for making the effort to get up with the guy who delivers the newspapers through the window of his car. The sounds of the morning commute won't begin for at least another hour. Life couldn’t be better—if you like that sort of thing. And therein lies my dilemma. Life could be better, it could be more dynamic…vital, the way an ER unit operates, or a newsroom on deadline. Which is exactly why I think the time has come to find a different reason to get me up and at ‘em. What I have in mind is a drawn out and bitter professional fight. Not a spat. Not a tiff. I want to feel the unremitting crosshairs of a loathsome adversary upon me, while returning the favor in kind.

Seeing that I’m done providing a livable income for my family—a task I have thankfully lost the stomach for, I thought it best to find a more worthy pursuit. Something I can really throw myself into, the way finding someone to vilify has always inspired in me.

In the course of my writing career, I’ve had my share of published pieces that have gone out into the public domain. Opinion pieces; pieces where I’ve injected a point of view that has stirred umbrage in a number of readers. I have had threatening phone messages left at my place of employ: that was for writing an editorial, where I mentioned the family history of a certain candidate for Provincetown selectman. His father had brutally murdered two girls earning himself the apt moniker of “Chop Chop.” Resurrecting touchy town history aside, I think my coining the phrase “Son of Chop Chop” was what irked the caller most. Then, there was the time I wrote a review for a show, calling the venue’s décor “cacogenic.” Well, how was I to know that owner of the said locale was the magazine’s biggest advertiser? I apologized, when he called, beginning his rebuke with “Who the hell do you think you are?” From that moment on, I wrote deferentially whenever his business was on my assignment list and felt “the eye” upon me from all his staff as I entered his premises. However misdirected my writing of the past was viewed, it has never produced the shot across my bow to ignite a war I now feel so ready to prosecute. The very essence of who I am has never been used as a battering ram against my professional output. I’ve never been called a “Jackass” in print, never humiliated for thinking what I think, never been afraid to “put in” again, having just survived a public mauling. But now I am. I’m buffalo tough and as pig-headed as anyone who has nothing to lose, including his reputation.

Of course these battles are normally reserved for writers, or people dealing in opinion and whose words correlate to their credibility. I mean if I were a manual laborer I would put my dukes up and toe the line. A chef: would relieve himself in his advisory’s soup. A cop: would frame you. A politician, tax you. A doctor…you never want to mess with a doctor. And yet, in the grand scheme of being tarred and feathered, the printed word still provides the ultimate reprimand.

And it's because writers are mostly solitary creatures. Alone with only their work, which is to say they are alone with themselves. And when this comes under due, or undue criticism, especially from a critic—a writer who has better connections and so gets paid to write subjectively—well, you can just hear the clang of the gauntlet striking the ground, cant’ you?

Some of these spats are now literary lore. They sit beside the author’s published work as if the incident were somehow was a prelude to their printed works. Norman Mailer, that Jewish Pulitzer Prize fighter, threw a drink at his longstanding rival Gore Vidal and punched him at the now infamous Lally Weymouth soiree—whoever she was. Keeping his composure Vidal replied, “As usual, words failed him.” Not to be left out, Truman Capote, equally at home in the viper lounge, wrote of the incident that it was a shame Mailer had not killed him. He, Capote, it must be said, was always the queen of bitches. On another occasion, a literary observation made by John Updike at Salman Rushdie’s choice of character names in his novel, Shalimar the Clown, riled Rushdie to make the philosophical observation, “A name is just a name. Somewhere in Las Vegas, there’s probably a male prostitute called John Updike.” This is the stuff that’s worth getting up for. Instead of coming down the stairs thinking, oh, yes, what was that line that slipped from my dreams into my semi-awaked consciousness? Broken on the wheel of her love? Broken by the weight of unmeasured sorrow? Instead, I could be fulminating how many eggs to leave on my adversary’s face. You know you’re alive when you’re being bad.

And it isn’t just the old-time writers who had the luxury of well-paid assignments and a population who read to provide them with the time and money to sit about being venal. That quality is found even in the jumpy clutch of contemporary writers living on bread and water and writing paragraphs for the discount online mob. The last tiff I followed was the very public, very personal altercation between the Esquire writer A. J. Jacobs, and another scribe Joe Queenan. It happened five years ago and started with a review: WHAM! Queenan's Assault. This prompted a rebuttal: SMASH! Jacob's Last Stand. It lasted just one round, then the referee jumped in and stopped the fight. No blood. No Mailer penknife in the back type thing. The combatants went to their desks and their lives carried on. For Jacobs this meant successive movie deals, one on the book in question. And for Queenan no movie deals at all. Which proves that in this day and age, the writer who goes to film laughs longest.

So then, who will be my lucky victim? Someone from my inner-circle? A hapless git who won’t fight back? I thought that I would fight myself…as in someone with the same name. Just google yourself and you’ll get the idea. There is a particular Michael Persson, who heads up the marketing team for Absolute vodka. He’s very successful, very well covered by the media and always, always available for an interview. Yes, him. I’d like to take on that big girl’s blouse and Bukowski him into submission. Which means I’ll drink 15 shots of Absolute and whiz in his shoes while he’s still in them. Or, I’ll send him a Linkedin “Please join my network” bleat, with the addendum “asshole” in capitals as my sign-off. Linkedin would be the perfect forum for this brawl. The business professional’s octagon.

So, on this morning as I slip down the creaking stairs to see the morning reflected in the kids’ paddling pool, what better way to receive that shot in the arm than to open my computer and see the blood run out of my screen from another murderous assault from my new best friend, my poison pen pal. En garde and come out fighting!