In praise of difficulty
For a while this summer, after the paperback release of my monumental book-length document, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, I was getting a lot of wild sexual come-ons from strangers. What upset them was not the book--a collection of my best pieces of nonfiction reporting from the last four decades--but some rather piquant remarks I'd made to the puerile popular press about my frequent uncontrollable erections. I knew it was a mistake to reply to these readers, but, hell, I was pretty horny, and I wasn't getting much at home. So I had a lot of Internet sex, so much that, in fact, I had to cancel the West Coast leg of my book tour and had to go to Sam's Club and get 100 boxes of extra Kleenex. Man. I was having web-sex with female fans all the time! All their notes made me so horny!
Taking a page from my old teacher, William Gaddis, I said to the women online, "Mmmmmmm. Baby. I want you to come for me so bad." And they did, as far as I know.
One email, though, really lodged in my craw. It was from a Ms. Foxy Widepussy, of Delaware. She said, first of all, that she imagined my "cock" was hard as a "rock," and then said, "the antipodes of my diurnality are so fucking swollen right now. I want you in my ass, so bad." And then she offered this caricature of me and my presumed audience:
"Big-titted women and tight-assed men really want you to fuck them, Pollack. They are ready for you wherever you go on the road. Anytime at all. They want you to thrust your hard member into them, this superior species of people who never read Harper's and The New Yorker."
Actually, those people didn't sound so bad, so I wrote her back. A few days later, I took the train to Wilmington, Delaware. We choloroformed her husband and went to their beach house, where we rode the funky monkey all night long. I forgot all about literature for several days, and have continued to forget about it since.
This changed the way I look at my profession. In college, I read a lot of books by guys who I thought were I lot like me, writers like Pynchon and DeLillo and, yes, William Gaddis. But then in my mid-20s, I struggled through a dreary editorial assistantship at a magazine that starts with N. I took a week off, claiming I had the flu, to read Remembrance of Things Past. About 15 pages in, I started masturbating. It was then I realized that I had to write the kinds of books that I found exciting, not the ones that I thought the intellectual elite might enjoy. I retreated to Mustique, where I began and ended my first novel, The Anatomy of Phoenix, in about 27 days. My audience, I'd realized, was people like me, ripped-out potentates with dick to burn and coke to snort. I could see them riding the subway, except none of them lived in New York. And they'd kick your flaccid ass.
So my literary career was born, and my most recent adventure in Delaware just reconfirmed what I'd learned earlier. Young reader, if you're thinking of becoming a writer and are wondering if you missed some important clue to success, remember what a lesser author than me once said: "The essense of postmodernism is an adolescent fear of getting taken in, an adolescent conviction that all systems are phoney. The theory is compelling, but as a way of life it's a recipe for rage. The child grows enormous but never grows up."
Okey-doke, then. Now I have a life to live, loser.
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