A Better History Lesson

With fear and hope in equal amounts and an oil-water mix, I just electronically sent off the manuscript for my book to an agent I’ve been in contact with since 2001. I’m nervous because I see some areas that surely could benefit from some work, but I am more afraid that I would have procrastinated to the point of paralysis and perpetual incompletion. Ultimately I thought, what the hell? I know the MS is substantially better. In fact, it is a completely different book from the one I was working on back in 2001. I wish it had a different title, but the title is so good I have never let it go. And it’s so good that I have always been afraid the book wouldn’t live up to the title (thereby creating yet another vicious hamster-wheel for my fears and hopes to run, chasing after each other in perpetuity).
That manuscript experience from 2001: I was living in Queens and working as a waiter at Babbo, the famous restaurant in Greenwich Village. I was drinking and drugging too much, and was aware that I had a serious drug and alcohol problem, but I was also trying to fight back by writing. Because I wasn’t clear about myself and a number of other things, I was writing from the wrong place and for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, when I wasn’t hungover or sleeping off another binge, I was finishing a messed-up collage of a manuscript that was dishonest and ambitious.
In an incredibly irresponsible move, I quit my job at Babbo before I could get fired. It was the second-to-last week of August. I was living in northwest Queens, and it was hot as only the outer boroughs in August can be. Being someone who lived hand-to-mouth, I was nearly broke, and it took the last cash in my account to print out a copy of that manuscript and deliver it by hand to the literary agency office on Union Square. I didn’t believe in the book; I didn’t really believe what I’d written. Nevertheless, I had a shard of a prayer in my heart that by some miracle a publisher would see that, somewhere behind the words, there was a writer with a story, and would have pity on me and my efforts. I remember that day: it was one of those humid, rainy days in late summer. The manuscript box got wet. I must have looked like a million other writers with a dream rooted more in despair than in discipline. And because of that, I was doomed to fail. I deserved nothing more.
The agent said that the manuscript was acceptable, but something about the communication conveyed the idea that it was marginally acceptable. I was told that the submissions to publishers would go on the week after Labor Day. Probably on Tuesday, September 11. With that glimmer of hope in my heart, I decided to make an effort at getting my act together. On Monday, September 10, I registered with a temp agency, and got a work assignment with one of the municipal election campaigns. The next day was Tuesday, Primary Day, and I was told to report to an office out by JFK by 7 a.m.

Somewhere during that next terrible day I had the utterly selfish realization that I’d already been given the answer about my manuscript. More importantly, the little hope I’d had was gone. The world had been altered in a morning and my manuscript, already an insignificant thing, was rendered even more so by the scale of what had happened. I accepted that on some level, but it would take another kind of change, and an earthshaking one, before I could start to write again. And before I could write the story of my family the way I wanted to. I haven’t included any of this in the book itself, but maybe that is the story I was trying to tell. If it’s supposed to be in there, I hope the agent will tell me so.