Doing Words

As some of you may know, I finished the novel that I began more or less thirteen years ago earlier this year, around Valentine's Day, and subsequently sent it to my agent, who, back in the summer of 2006, after reading the excerpt that Narrative Magazine had recently published (see link to the left, under bio), cold-called me to see if I had representation, and if I had more for her to read. It was a very heady day. I had just given a reading a month earlier that had gone over well, surprising some of my friends who had suspected that, rather than writing all these years, I was sitting in my living room most every day sucking back martinis with my bacon and eggs while staring, increasingly pixillated, at Rockies highlights on ESPN, if not something quite a lot more nefarious and fun, that might have involved roller blades, party hats, chocolate sundaes with cherries on top—all of which, I should add, are possibilities for Tuesday morning, when the children go back to school—and now I was getting a call from an agent, a Harvard graduate, smart, young, hungry and beautiful, I would later find out, from an established house in New York.

I had 180 pages out with my editor, I told her, anxiously, so no, I didn't have anything more for her to read just yet—but would, soon, I promised. In the meantime, perhaps we could have lunch? It so happened I was coming to New York at the end of the month, on my way to Nova Scotia. Sure, she said ... and a few weeks later we met at a place in Midtown, on Broadway, an Italian place where they were showing "La Dolce Vita" on the wall, Anita Eckburg soaking wet in the Trevi ... How long have you been working on the book? she, my prospective agent, asked, after confiding that the excerpt she read reminded her vaguely of ... Mrs. Dalloway (there is nothing she could have said that could have flattered me more, and I mean nothing). I told her around ten years, give or take, that instead of writing, say, four books and throwing them in a drawer, I had just kept at this one, and somehow it had kept going with me. This, I was hoping, put me in a class with Shirley Hazzard, Harold Brodkey, Marilynne Robinson, and one of my teachers, the great measured pace novelist Carol Edgarian. Anyway, the agent didn't seem to care if it had taken me 20 years, and getting my attention once more away from Anita Eckburg's drenched visage, said she was eager to read more. Later, that fall, I would be in New York City again, this time for a friend's birthday, and would hand her 66 pages of recently edited work after having drinks at the Algonquin. Might as well be stylish about the hand off, yes? She would like these pages, too, if not, it seemed, quite as much as she'd liked that excerpt. Still, it didn't occur to me that, in spite of a signed contract (which she'd been careful to explain didn't mean much), she would, roughly a year later, when I sent her what I thought was the final draft of the book, tell me that she didn't think she could sell it. I asked her why, and she really couldn't tell me. She'd lost me somewhere in the middle, she said, and, sensing myself that the middle was the weakest part of the book, I tore it open over the next couple of years and redrafted it (while my wife was in nursing school, and later, when I was taking classes to do the same, with two young boys orbiting, after selling a farm, while the financial world was falling apart), and then sent it to her again, last February, though her opinion, regrettably, didn't change. I was more braced for the disappointment this time, however. Rather than getting kicked in the gut, it was more like I'd finally summited a mountain after a long climb only to run into a couple of twelve year olds in hoodies, brandishing screwdrivers, telling me they wanted money, right now, and that if I was thirsty, due to blood loss from my screwdriver wounds, there was a half a can of Red Bull leaned over there on a rock, next to where they'd pissed. Anyway, they were leaving now ...

Not to say my agent, my former agent, perhaps my agent again should I get her something that she can sell, wasn't kind. I'm sure it isn't easy to give a writer bad news. Most of us are assholes on a good day, and this was not a good day. Yet she wasn't, and isn't, the sort of person who lives up to the stereotypes, who puts a bad taste in your mouth, and that made it all the more dispiriting. It would have been nice to at least be able to hate her.

I haven't done a thing with the manuscript since ... but, hey, that is about to change.

As some of you also know, I applied to the Regis Nursing Program earlier this summer. Out of 380 applicants, I was one of 180 who was selected to be interviewed. Of those, 96 would be taken. I discovered late Wednesday, on the Regis website, that I was not one of those, but part of the next group of 40 or so "alternates." Which is to say that I still don't know if I'll be going to nursing school in January. Certainly I can't plan on it. Between five and twenty-five accepted students, for one reason or another, will decline their acceptance between now and January 9th, and Regis will replace them from my unranked group of forty alternates, a group that, for one reason or another, will also grow smaller over time.

I was reminded when I called the point person at Regis minutes after finding out, near crazy with despair but trying hard not to show it, that the process was intensely competitive. Still, I had aced all my recent science classes, taken, many of them, while I was finishing the novel. I had considerable experience in health care, a child who had survived cancer—what the fuck?

Yet when the last class of students has an overall GPA of 3.5 (a number formerly associated with admittance into medical school, not nursing school), an overall GPA in the high twos, early undergrad transcripts all but stamped with Misspent Youth perhaps tend to stand out. As I suspect they did.

Still, I'm an alternate. I should probably be pleased.

Fuck that.

For some time now I've wondered what I'd do if I didn't get accepted. In these abstract moments suicide is generally, for vainglorious reasons, no doubt, at the top of my list. It was the same way when I was working on the book, thinking, What if this doesn't work? What then? Well, I could always kill myself ...

Similarly, if I didn't get into nursing school at age 51 ...

Easy come, easy go.

But, as that movie "The Anniversary Party" pointed out, children rather rob us of this option. Never mind that I'm too much of a coward to do it even if I had Alzheimer's.

And Donna, who'd get quite an insurance payout if I staged it well (ran my car off a bridge, say, as opposed to taking both barrels to the head, which would be derivative, but never mind), claims she'd rather have me than the money, at least this was still true last week—

So ... I may have to get back to where, according to Donna and few others, I belong in the first place: Doing words.

And possibly editing other people's words. Which pays better—nearly anything does. And I'm good at it. And would likely enjoy it more than wiping other people's asses, getting sputum shot at me ...

Yet, you watch, those Regis people, now that I've had this Come-To-Jesus Moment, will probably let me in, just to be perverse, to fuck with my head.

I guess we'll see.

I'll keep you posted.

And btw—I'm back.