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August 14, 2006
My New Job
Though it’s rewards are at best ironic, and the pay rather negligible, I have accepted the position as a “Substitute Guest Author”, for Barnes & Noble Bookstores. I hadn’t even realised such a position existed, or that in fact I had been listening to substitute guest authors on several occasions myself, in attendance at these events on the second floor Community Room, here in Rochester, N.Y. But by an odd chain of events, which started with a flippant remark, I found myself actually volunteering to stand in for a circuit touring novelist who was a no-show at the local store, on a Thursday evening. A joking suggestion turned into a serious idea, and a half hour later I was standing at the podium, not just filling in for a Mr. Blake Eggleson, but pretending to be him.
I think that was his name. But I may be mixing him up with one or another of the fourteen or fifteen others I have impersonated, thus far in my short career. Three poets, one self-published memorist who was just too shy to show for his own reading and panicked at the last minute, but mostly just “first”, which means doomed, novelists--oh, and one guy who wrote an actually profound treatise on the Shroud of Turin-- these have been my assignments, so far.
Of course the Rochester store at Pittsford Plaza is my usual haunt; where I have a nodding acquaintance with the clerks, and am fine-tuning a running dialogue with the cafe girls. So it is extraordinary that I got away with the one stand-in I did there, for I could so easily have been recognised, as myself (so to speak). That Barnes & Noble is where I return, always right away after one of my sojourns in disguise, into the conquered lands of all Barnes & Noble--to regain my sense of self (so to speak). Even though in this job, which I like to say is the job I couldn’t refuse, I am being someone different each time, I do get a sense of how being a public person, an Author, is always at variance with that old familiar self one can be, as long as they are not recognised by strangers, at home. There is where my talent was discovered and I was given the proverbial break, if being a designated S.G.A. can be viewed as a real job . . .
Now I will tell how I got launched, or vaulted, or jettisoned, into this role, and why I am so perfect, so well-suited by history and temperament, for it. Though as I have indicated it is fundamentally a degradation and an insult, maybe even a major setback to the real Mortimer Shy--who must always prepare, and be in readiness, for his own lecture tour. As it was happening, on that Thursday evening, I thought it was the most unprecedented and unlikely scenario ever to befall a hapless bookstore regular. After it was over, and I was actually offered the job of doing it again, and again, all over Western New York and parts of Pennsylvania, I have since realised how naive it is to think the franchised literary world is without systems of deception.
Still, I completely stumbled into it. I was on the second floor looking out over the balcony with my telescope--I mean my telescopic vision, which you need up there if it is your wont to watch what is going on over at the Customer Service Desk. Yes, so if I am a spy on humanity, it is humanities fault--they gave me the work! What I saw from this privileged view was an animated conference going, between the lady in the high-necked pants suit whom I know to be the Hostess of most of these local events, and two young clerks. Down the aisle to my left, past the Art Books, there were about thirty people already sitting in the Community Room, facing an empty lectern w/microphone. At the entrance to the Community Room was one of those metal stands with a poster of the author and the title of his book. “The Domain of the Wretched,” if I recall correctly,
There could be a question as to how much I looked like the fellow in the poster. But, one might say, I looked enough like him. I had noticed the resemblance, earlier in the week when I scoured the Events Calendar, and went through my usual cycle of obsessive persecutions, relentlessly trying to figure out why I am not one of these guys, running through all possible jealousies and vindictive comparisons, but ending in a kind of triumphant exhaustion, feeling on the whole quite smug enough.
Now, this fateful eve, a sense of eager anticipation, true suspense, built rapidly as I watched this scene below; and quickly this yielded to a perception of actual crisis, as the clerks started pointing to the big doors to the outside and throwing up their hands, clearly mouthing: “I don’t know where he is!” The pants-suited Hostess was officious and deadly calm as always, and she actually glanced skyward, which, little did she know, was in my direction. And that might have been exactly when the idea flew into my head. Or when the devil of the idea literally launched me from my comfortable stuffed chair, and made me almost fly over the balcony. Instead, I lurched toward the escalator, as if rushing to catch up--with my own fleet person, almost late for an appointment with destiny. Though the escalator ride was agonisingly slow, I seemingly I arrived just in time, to hear one of the clerks say: “I don’t know what we are going to do!” Then the other guy says, “the sub is down with the flu!”, a statement which I didn’t understand at the the time, nor the degree of his apparent frustration.
So I walked in between the three of them and said, “I’ll do it.” And I swear, I was only compelled by the sense that this was a great joke, a kind of superior kidding--I mean I was willing to be kidding, I just thought this was the funniest kind of in-joke. The highest kind of irony, after all, that I should be willing to step into the shoes of, well, anyone! I kind of thought they all kind of knew me, anyway--I hang around there enough without buying much but coffee. But, without showing any astonishment at all, she said, “Okay, go ahead.”
I’d like to say it was with great trepidation, and a fear that I would not be able to fulfill the expectations of the crowd, that I stepped into that room and took the microphone and said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, we’ll get started right away now” (after being introduced of course by the royally attired Hostess, where I was able to pick up a few key facts about myself). But how hard is it, to give a short blustering statement about how hard it was to write your book, and then read the first chapter from it? I don’t fit every role, but I can pass for any fiction or non-fiction author, certainly any poet, who is between a drooping thirty-five and a spritely sixty, and even those lines can be pushed and blurred when audiences are arriving in such a state of expectation they will believe anything they see and hear. Of course I only appear in front of small audiences in Community Rooms or the Bookstore Cafe, I am not impersonating anyone well known by the general public (though I do look like Stephen King, sort of, if you take that look off his face!). I just stand in for those on their way up or down, in the escalators marked Fame and Oblivion.
Which does lead one to wonder just why Barnes & Noble feels it necessary to have such a position as I fill. Well, it is because in this world publicity trumps even celebrity. That is why it is important to keep these tours and Book Signings by second and third-tier writers intact. It becomes more important to fulfill the calendar predictions of the Bookstore than anything else. The actual identity of the author is secondary--it can be faked, for the sake of keeping up the event and the schedule. Events must . . . come true. Or a very severe disenchantment in the reading public could set in. The sense that the culture has sanctioned that book in your hands . . . is that book's tenuous grip on you.
Posted by mortimer at August 14, 2006 04:20 PM