Free About the Author by John Colapinto

customers. “What are you doing? Where are you going? You have to unpack those books. Those have to be unpacked by tonight. What are you doing?”
    At the doors that led to the street, I grasped the handle, stopped, and, before walking out, turned to look into his twitching face. I’d been rehearsing a few exit lines on my march; these included “Ladies and gentleman, Elvis has left the building,” which I rejected as hackneyed. “You are starting to bore me,” had a clean, cutting quality, but I wasn’t sure I could deliver the line with the requisite bland insouciance; “Fuck you,” was too blunt and piggish. Blocked as usual, I ended up scrapping all these drafts, and leaving without a word.
    A few hours later, I was in Blackie’s office high above Fifty-seventh Street, leaning over his desk with a Mont Blanc fountain pen (supplied by Blackie) in my hand. I lowered the pen tip toward the contract, and as I placed my signature on the dotted line, I was, for some reason, visited by a creepy recollection of scribbling my name on a grubby corner of the
Daily News
with a pencil stub, and for a moment the sound of Blackie’s excited voice faded away, replaced by a long, lingering memory-echo of Klein’s cracked voice bouncing down the facades of Waverly Place: “
You must do my bidding
. . . .” This aural hallucination then faded to a quite different voice, scratchy, raucous, drunken, squealing excitedly: “
You’re gonna be rich, dude! You’re gonna be rich
. . . .”
     

PART TWO
     
1
     
    Until I sold a novel to a publisher, I had never imagined the long lag time that exists between the inking of a book contract and the moment when the product appears in stores. I was amazed when Blackie told me that Phoenix would need almost
nine months
to prepare my novel for publication, a span devoted to editing and copyediting the text, proofreading and typesetting it, creating cover art, writing jacket-flap and promotional copy, making up galleys (known as advance reader’s editions—paperback versions sent out to selected cultural buzzmeisters to generate a groundswell of favorable word of mouth), and then the printing of copies, followed by their distribution to the stores—where people like my former stockboy self would unpack them and put them on the shelves. Not until
next spring
could I expect to hold a copy of the actual book in my hand. It was now only August! “How am I going to kill the time until then?” I wailed to Blackie. “Enjoy yourself,” he said. “You’ve earned the break.”
    Trying to believe this, I spent the next stunned and unreal weeks strolling around the summer city. I shopped for a whole new wardrobe. I roamed and browsed through bookstores. I attended smart parties with Blackie. I briefly dated an eighteen-year-old model. In late August, I even got a sample of what the marketing barrage for my novel was going to feel like.
People
, enticed by publishing gossip about my boffo book and movie sales, arranged to have me photographed for a short advance item in the front of the magazine. By then I had moved into a sun-pierced, fully furnished Village sublet that had (through Blackie’s ministrations) opened up for me. The photographer was a grinning, bearded man named Raoul, who thought it might be nice to snap me on the balcony overlooking Perry Street, with its glimpse of the Hudson at one end. As Raoul’s camera clicked and whirred, he kept chanting, “Beeg smile, beeg smile”—through sheer force of habit, I’m sure, since I was smiling all the time, those days.
    There was only one small cloud on the horizon. I had yet to inspect the posthumous stories, notes, and diaries of Stewart’s that I had saved. I had long planned to sift through those materials for any potentially incriminating references to my novel. But I had been procrastinating, afraid that the task might disturb the delicate peace I had made in my mind about the tricky ethics surrounding the novel’s