Datesville: Out of the Land of Bondage!

Chapter 4 — The Hideous Depression

 

After my return from Central City and a brief, two-day visit with Mom, I fly back to New York.  And as agreed, I call Todd Willingham a couple of days later to meet for beers at Blarney’s and commiserate my misfortune and perhaps pry a tidbit or two out of him, explaining better why ZMC canned me.  But Willingham is evasive.  He has another commitment that evening, he says, so won’t be able to meet me.  And he would ask for a raincheck, he adds, except his work schedule is “absolutely horrendous!”  “Henry, this departmental reorganization thing has me tied up all the way through April!  Can you believe it!  I just have no idea when I’ll get any time for myself.”  So Willingham and I make no further plans to meet for beers.

I know what’s up, though; he doesn’t have to tell me.  Obviously, the higher-ups have gotten to Todd and threatened him, not to talk to, or help me in any way.  This feels like a punch in the gut!  Willingham and I go way back, over ten years.  We’ve been good friends and colleagues for that long, and that says something in a town like New York.

Meanwhile, my life gets hectic.  For one, I can’t earn a living.  Three-quarters of my income dried up the minute ZMC fired me which, by the way, was two years ago last November.  So, consequently, I’m no longer able to afford my life in the city.

To stay afloat, I cash out my investment portfolio, only to see my savings evaporate quicker than expected.  And, I call Mark Tank, my literary agent.  I say, hey Mark, look, I need more work, a lot more, soon! and explain to him how critical my situation is.  Sure, no problem, he says.  But after that, it feels like he’s avoiding me; and it gets harder to reach him by phone; and he won’t answer my texts.  And the work Mark sends my way is social media fillers that don’t pay diddly-squat; I know for sure I can’t survive in New York on this.

Then, when I do finally reach Mark by phone, he says: Things have slowed down, Henry.  I suspect, however, that what he really means is that word has gotten out about ZMC blackballing me and, therefore, managing editors among the independent media companies aren’t lining up to hire me for fear that Zircon-McCade might blackball them, too.  Zircon-McCade is, as mentioned, a behemoth with a long reach in the publishing industry.

So more months pass and work continues drying up and I become uncertain about where things are headed and more desperate as a result.

Finally, I decide to quit writing under my real name and take a pen name in an attempt to end run the death grip ZMC has on my career.  Sure, I’ve used pen names before but only under certain circumstances, not as something more permanent.  I settle on Harvey Orange as my new pseudonym.  It’s got a nice ring, don’t you think?

I figure, as Harvey Orange, I can avoid associations with ZMC and, perhaps, generate more work.  Of course, I brief Mark on this development.  Cool, he says, it might work.  But changing my name also means editors who know me and know my reputation as a journalist and who are familiar with my work, now have no idea who the hell Harvey Orange is.  Mind you, these people hate working with writers they’ve never heard of.  Thus the evolving complications of my career continue while my prospects for turning things around dwindle.  Basically, despite the name change, I’m still screwed.

You know, it’s amusing how unemployment affects one’s social life.  I was never one of these fawning individuals who invests an excessive amount of time and energy, cultivating a circle of friends with the idea of “more is better”.   But, in New York, I still have probably two dozen friends I see occasionally, at one party or another, maybe a couple of times a year.  And they call me, now and then, to attend hockey games or concerts, or meet them for drinks at an Irish pub after work—that sort of thing.  And, though I may not see them often, I can always count on a friend to hang with, when I want one, or to invite over for pizza.  That was true, until I became unemployed.

With unemployment, I suddenly have the same trouble reaching friends as I do Mark Tank, and none of them returns my call.  I truly did not know just how much I depended on my so called social network until it went extinct.

But there’s something else.  My mother has, inexplicably, stopped conversing with me.  Oh, she will talk to me on the phone when I call, but we don’t converse anymore.  I know you understand the difference.

I’ve wondered, is it because I didn’t move back to Churchill as she asked?  I don’t know.  More likely, I figure, it was the shock she experienced when the medical examiner called that day and confronted us with the possibility that the body in the Central City morgue could have been Patsy.  Or perhaps Mom has realized Patsy may already be dead, somewhere, and this thought affects her profoundly.  Again, I can’t say.  But something, whatever it may be, has caused Mom to slip into a reticence—at least toward me, if not her friends in Churchill.

After my return to New York, Mom became distant.  I would call her and she would answer the phone, of course.  But, then, she seems to never have time to talk; always, something else presses for her attention when I call.  And when we do speak, she avoids sharing anything important about her life.  So I try to coax her to open up, but she only replies, in that artificially chipper tone she sometimes uses, “You shouldn’t worry about me, Henry.  I get along just fine.”  And this is the signal that she will not tolerate any further prying.  Thus, our conversations are limited to weather reports and recaps of TV programs she has watched recently.

If I persist in asking questions after the you-shouldn’t-worry-about-me warning, she scolds me by saying: “Henry, you make me feel like I’m standing in front of the Spanish Inquisition.  I don’t quiz you about your life, now do I?”  At this point, I apologize and the conversation either returns to weather forecasts or TV trivia or we let it die altogether.

For several months, she does not share with me anything about her health or daily activities or her ideas, plans, or desires, and not even the latest note about her flowers which she loves and which bloom in her backyard.  She simply cuts me off emotionally.

So eight months pass, and right before I move from New York to Tulsa, I lose phone service for not paying my bill, and I haven’t, yet, been able to replace it.  I’m sure Mom must wonder why I haven’t called.  Now, fifteen months have passed since then; I’ve tried calling twice using the pay-booth, but both times she did not answer.  Probably she did not recognize the number when the call came in and that was why she didn’t pick up.  Or perhaps she is afraid some other medical examiner from some other part of the country is calling with news about Patsy that she’d rather not hear.  So I’ve lost touch with my mother, and now I have no idea what the weather is doing in Churchill or what TV programs Mom finds entertaining.  Sorry, that was cruel.  And to be fair, when she and I still had contact, I wasn’t sharing all of the nitty gritty details of my life with her, either.  So she didn’t know anything about my deteriorating situation at the time nor how bad it has gotten since.

 *  *  *  *

There is something else, perhaps, I should mention about myself—or about my career, I should say—because, if I neglect it, you might assume that my current predicament has somehow caught me by surprise.  It hasn’t really, or at least not completely.  I’ve known theoretically that something like this can happen to anyone, myself included.

See, my bread and butter story has never been the billionaire profile, like the one I planned to write featuring Marcus Purcell.  The billionaire profile has always and only been a bonus gig.  It pays well but audience interest in such an article is extremely narrow, limited mostly to those who like the SOB featured in the story.  No, my real bread and butter is, and has always been, the plight of the common American during this so called Grand Depression which began, by the way, in October of 2029, a year before my birth.  The Grand Depression has dragged on now for four decades and appears to have no end.  “Grand!”  What a poor choice of adjective, if you ask me!  It implies that what people in this country incessantly endure is somehow magnificent—in a good way—or at least important.  But I say, why not call it what it is?  How about the Hideous or Perpetual Depression?  Or why not the Really Shitty Depression?  Wouldn’t these descriptors seem a bit more accurate?  Grand my ass!  Anyway—

But I’m one of the lucky ones (at least I was until recently) because I’ve managed to escape the dregs of this epoch and have avoided the great cesspool of terrible misery and despair into which so many of my fellow countrymen, and -women, have fallen.  But as stated, I’ve written upwards of forty to fifty articles which have appeared widely, over the years, in well-read periodicals and on popular news sites, describing the sufferings of ordinary people from every walk of life.  And for these bread and butter stories, there never seemed to be a lack of material because it was available everywhere throughout the good ol’ U S of A.

My stories featured former factory workers, school teachers, IT engineers, among so many others, who spent years outdoors in tent-camps, on desolate windblown mountains, in swamplands or deserts, in wooded ravines and on riverbanks, not to mention in the crumbling buildings of inter-cities, or on the margins of dangerous freeways.  Most of these lived in such conditions without shelter, for thirty years or more.  The old-timers were those who remembered life before the crash.  These were the best stories because they depicted the loss of a way of life which the victims, to some extent, had enjoyed.  Not many old-timers yet survive because so many perished prematurely.

I’ve written, too, about people who lived without homes, apartments, bathrooms, and running water for their entire lives—second-generation homeless, as they are known—who were still youths when their stories appeared in magazines they would never read.  Their mothers told how they gave birth in tents, and counted themselves lucky because so many former nurses also populated the camps in those days and were exceptionally generous and goodhearted women who volunteered as midwives and delivered their babies.

For ten years, I traveled and lived out of motels and wrote these stories, describing, basically, only one story—over and over again:  The story’s protagonist was always a middle- or working-class American who lost her job for one reason or another, who couldn’t regain financial stability thereafter, no matter how hard she tried, who prior to her present dilemma could never fathom losing everything she owned, including her family but, of course, did, and who, up until the very day I interviewed her, refused to relinquish hope that one day—without even the prospect of gainful employment anywhere in sight and suffering failing health because of lack of decent nutrition—that one day she would reclaim the modest dream of a “normal life” and that somehow she would find again what had slipped through her fingers a decade or two earlier.  This same protagonist would never concede that homelessness might be the last chapter of her life.  “No, no, this isn’t going to beat me,” she’d say, but in every case it was homelessness that won in the end.

And for ten years, periodicals, catering to the apparatchik-class of the American audience, whose hearts were “crushed” over the tragedy of the Grand Depression, couldn’t get enough of my stories, especially when uploaded with photos of the poverty and squalor in which these individuals lived.  But that was then.

Now Mark Tank informs me that the market for my bread and butter story has dried up, that people these days want “uplifting, inspirational narratives about those who’ve escaped the abyss of poverty and homelessness and pulled their lives out of the toilet.”  Basically, what the American audience wants to read now is that the Grand Depression has, at last, faded into history, so that they no longer have to pay attention to it.  Yes, that would be nice, I tell Mark, except there are no such narratives!  Nothing out there has changed! I tell him.  Or maybe inspirational narratives do exist, he suggests, and you’ve just overlooked them.  Whatever, I say.

 *  *  *  *

Last March, I had to give up my nice apartment in Manhattan.  What I replace it with is a ratty studio in Bushwick, situated in a neighborhood where you don’t go out after dark.  But it isn’t long before I can’t stand the limitations and aggravations that encompassed me on every side and remember how things felt here, in Tulsa, the last time I was out.  I knew things here weren’t great, but they did seem better.

So in preparation to relocate, I pare down my belongings to what I can carry in a duffle bag then purchase a bus ticket for Oklahoma.  The good thing is, I know exactly where I want to live when I get here—the exotic and affordable Bermuda Hotel!  And, with the savings I still have, and the semi-dependable flow of piecemeal work from Mark, I figure I can survive in Tulsa indefinitely.  Plus—and this is the bonus—in Tulsa I’m swimming in a sea of personal misfortune that will allow me to study, up close, the heroes of my future bread and butter stories.  And I won’t have to look far to find them because they’ll literally be my neighbors.  Heck, I might even write a bestseller!

So I arrive in Tulsa mid-August, and boy is it hot!  Waiting in the lobby of the Bermuda Hotel for the manager to materialize from wherever it is he is hiding, an old fellow, who’s also waiting, strikes up a conversation with me.  We talk about the dreadful heat, of course.  The old fellow puts it this way:  “Lord, it’s hotter’n a blister bug in a pepper patch out there.”  But as he says this, it’s probably over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, right there in the lobby where we’re talking.

If you’re here for very long, Tulsa begins to feel like “the homeless person capital of the world”.  But the homeless people you see are actually only the tip of the iceberg of those who are present.  Most stay out of sight and for good reason.  On the other hand, people like Purcell who have everything they want and need don’t really believe in the Grand Depression.  They see it as a cultural myth, something writers like me have invented to make them look and feel bad for being successful and powerful.  Lord have mercy!

Finally the manager shows up and I learn that the Bermuda can’t accommodate me because it’s full.  So I have to put my name on a waiting list and seek living arrangements elsewhere.  But elsewhere is much more expensive.  Still, the manager assures me that there’s a constant turnover at the Bermuda, so I shouldn’t have to wait more than a month for a room, even though there are seventy names on the list ahead of me.

But the only other accommodation I can find in Tulsa, anywhere, is a small basement room and half bath in a neighborhood of brick houses for the modest rent of seven-hundred a month.  At least the room is cool, I tell myself, and take it.  But the initial costs of renting the room take a large bite out of my savings.  I contact Mark again and tell him I need a couple of good paying jobs, NOW!  Sure, he says, his standard answer.  This time, I try to impress on him the urgency of my situation: “Mark, I can’t sustain myself for more than three months here without work.”  “Don’t worry, Henry; I’ll take care of it,” he says and hangs up.

Over the next month or so, I e-mail Mark two articles.  A week later, he responds regarding one of them.  That article is titled The Great Divide.  “Good news!” Mark writes, “Mary Fossy at NWN loved the Great Divide piece and wants it.  Done deal!  Negotiating but should bring at least a grand, minus commission, of course.  Just waiting to hear back.  MT.”

What Mark’s message means is I should receive a check for seven-hundred dollars soon.  I grumble because the article Mark refers to required a fair investment of research for which I bought several hours of internet time at the local internet cafe while writing it.  Plus it’s a two-thousand word article that should have brought no less than eighteen hundred dollars from an outfit like NWN.  Mark’s deal smells fishy to me.

I try to call him but can’t seem to reach him by phone, and he hasn’t answered any of my texts or emails.  I leave several frantic voice messages, hoping Mark will contact me.  Five days pass before I finally get this, via e-mail:  “Still negotiating with Fossy at NWN.  In the meantime sold Starlings to The Candle—a cool little rag.  Wired the check to your account.  Stay in touch.  MT.”

Yeah, I’d like to stay in touch, Mark, if you’d answer your goddamn phone, I say to myself.  I’ve never heard of The Candle.  Must be some internet magazine or something.  Anyway, Tank neglects to mention what amount he has wired to my account, so I have to look it up.  Five—hundred—dollars!  Not even three weeks’ rent!  So now I’m beginning to panic and  start hounding the manager at the Bermuda to see if anything has come available.  I also submit the required month-in-advance notice to my landlord that I’ll be leaving his dungeon at the end of November, though without any guarantee that something at the Bermuda will turn up.

The money has gotten really tight.  Finally I have to close my checking account because I can’t afford the fees to keep it open.  I’m living, in terms of money, cash-out-of-pocket and I still can’t reach that SOB, Mark Tank.

At this point, I say to heck with Mark and begin calling friends to see who might be in the market for a good, depressing story about the Grand Depression.  Maybe I can do better than a thousand dollars for my big story.  It might not work, however, since I am still under contract with Mark.  But if I do find a better bid, then perhaps, I can turn the deal over to Mark and we both come out a little more flush.  But I really need something after taking such a bath on the Starlings piece.

All of this rigmarole with Mark takes time away from my writing—actually producing any new work which is precisely why I hired a stupid agent in the first place.  So I call around but quickly learn that I don’t have as many contacts in the business as I used to.  Some have retired; some have died; some have simply dropped off the face of the planet.  But in the process, I catch this rumor, floating around, about Mark, my agent.  The rumor has it that Mark has skipped the country.  Literally!  Moved to Panama, they say.  Well, this is the story I hear from Tony Spino.

“I guess old Tank moved to Panama,” he says and chuckles.  Tony finds this amusing, but, frankly, I’m not laughing.  “It was either Panama or Columbia or someplace hot like that,” says Tony and laughs in my ear with his cigar cough.  If it wasn’t Hell, I think, then it can’t be hot enough!.  Tony continues his story.  “Yeah, someone said he’s living in a cabana on the beach, eating bananas, and drinking Margaritas.  They say he doesn’t even own a cell phone.”

Shit! I think.  What about the NWN deal?  What’s happened to that?  Did he take the money and run?  This means I will have to call Mary Fossy.

The article Mark supposedly sold to NWN is a human interest piece about the sharp contrast in lifestyles between the haves and have-nots which Tulsa so poignantly illustrates.  It’s a good piece, I think, highlighting the destitute and rich, living literally one block apart but, figuratively, on separate planets.  I had hoped Mark would turn it quickly, and, until my chat with Spino, was under the impression he had.

So here’s the thing: I have a really great, missing story—and photos to go with it—and an uncertain buyer while I’m in panic mode here in Tulsa, in October, without enough money to pay next month’s rent, and an agent who’s lounging on a beach somewhere in Panama, sipping Margaritas.  I can’t help but feel there’s something wrong with this picture.

What does one do in these cases?  Well, I do the only thing I can: I call Mary Fossy.  Mary manages NWN (it’s a magazine) where Mark said he had the “done deal.”  So I ask Mary if she knows anything about the piece I wrote which, supposedly, Mark Tank had submitted to her for publication, and I ask whether or not she knows if NWN purchased the piece.  Mary says she knows Mark but has not worked with him much and has not spoken to him in over a year.  “Perhaps,” she suggests, “Mark pitched the story to one of our other editors but, certainly, any serious query would have crossed my desk.  I’m sorry, Henry, but I haven’t seen it.”

“Hey,” she adds, “I hear Mark is in Panama now, is that true?”

“Probably,” I say, then thank her for her time and hang up.

By this time, I’m more than worried.  I begin calling every publisher I know to sell the Divide article myself.  But everyone—though they like the premise—has either just published a piece like it or has recently tightened their budgets “due to the recession.”  Recession!?  How on earth can there be a recession in the middle of this so called Grand Depression?  I’m not an economist, but this seems wacky to me.

Anyway—

One editor, I talk to, claims he’s published several stories like mine but says his audience requires “upbeat and life affirming material, now, especially since things have dragged on for so long.”  He adds that our national economic morass doesn’t make good copy anymore and people are sick of reality.  “Henry,” he complains, “people crave escape.  They want to be voyeurs.”  Then he asks if I have any big articles, featuring the lifestyles of wealthy celebrities.  I invite him to go to hell.

Finally, my oldest buddy in the business says he would love to have my story but explains he can only give me three-hundred dollars for it, though he knows it’s worth much more than that.  He says, even at this, he’ll have to push back the publication date nine months but will advance me the three-hundred now if I can afford to part with it for that.  I take his offer without dickering.  At this point, the decision isn’t rocket science.

And as soon as I get the check, I’m back at the Bermuda Hotel, asking the manager if he’s got any openings.  And, lo and behold, he says a room opened that very morning, and I can have it—if I’ve got the cash.  I pay him on the spot, take the key, and move in that afternoon.

This all happened back in late October.  Now it’s January and cold as hell and by the end of this week, short of a miracle, I’ll find myself searching for a place to sleep on the streets of Tulsa.

Maybe getting out of this town and heading someplace warm isn’t a bad idea.

Copyright © 2023 by Dale Tucker  All rights reserved.