“What do you mean, what did I do last night? I went to bed.”
Claudia’s face maintained its grin like a female version of the Joker.
She said, “I’m sure you did.”
That was enough of that. Nikola started to show his Italian roots. He said, “Hey, do you have something against me?” He was ready to defend himself. He wondered if he had scorned her in some way. He didn’t remember having any arguments with her. So why was she yanking his chain?
Claudia finally erased her grin and shook her head. “No, I’m fine with you. I think you’re ah, a pretty good writer. But I also think you need to take your personal life . . . a little more seriously,” she advised him. “And I’m just basing this on what I’ve heard.”
“Heard from who?” he demanded.
She told him, “From too many people to name.” And she walked away without another word to him.
“Shit!” Nikola grumbled to himself as he walked off. “So what, I’m a single guy?” he rationalized.
Then he thought about it. I know that Susan wouldn’t tell anyone, but . . .
He thought about all of the other industry women that he had slept with or tried to over the years, from the moment he had stepped into the publishing industry. He considered the women in publishing as a much sexier challenge to him, where he could match his wits with theirs to uncover their lustful fantasies.
He thought, How can these women read so many racy, slutty, romance novels for a living and not have an overflow of lust of their own? He figured they had to be horny. All of them? How could they not be? So he went about proving it, and had scored quite often with them, especially with the young ones who were brand new to the industry and its ethics of not sleeping around with the authors. That had to be rule number one for the young women in publishing, which only served to make him want them more, as if his desire was to break them all, including the young female authors like Darlene Krause, his new challenge. But maybe his gig was finally up, and too many industry women were now talking about him to ruin his fun.
“Shit,” he grumbled again, softer the second time. Maybe I do need to tone it down with the industry types. Then he paused. But they’re so much fun to deal with . . . Shit.
DeWayne tossed his dark blue blazer over his shoulder and blue Yankees t-shirt before grabbing his black carry bag. He was ready to head down to Manhattan for the Jacob Javits Center to sign giveaway copies of his upcoming book, Real G’s Never Die.
D loved that he still lived in the heart of Brooklyn off of Flatbush Avenue. Whenever he walked into his second-floor apartment he felt the silence, class and elevation of a new world, but once he stepped back outside, he returned to the real deal of tough city streets that he wrote about, and a world that took no prisoners.
He began his normal walk down the street toward the bus stop and spoke to the normal characters who hung out in his neighborhood.
“What’s up, son? You headed back to the city?” asked Ollie, the neighborhood weed man. He sat on his front stoop with the Rasta look; smooth coco brown skin, oversized clothes, and dreadlocked hair that flowed halfway down his back, but he wasn’t a Rasta. Ollie was a true-blue American who had interests in a number of different things, including reading. He had even read a few of Double D’s books.
D nodded to him. “Yeah, I got a book event down at the Javits Center.”
Ollie’s front stoop was only two houses away from the bus stop near the corner, so D stood there to shoot the breeze with him.
Ollie nodded back and stroked his week-old beard. “You still got that same editor?”
“Yeah.” D didn’t think anything of it. But Ollie did. Ollie wanted a book deal himself, to write about his life as a proud weed dealer. Shit, if HBO could have a television show about a white girl selling weed, then why couldn’t he write a book about it, and all of the crazy people he got involved with while selling it. So he was jealous as hell that D had a book deal and he didn’t.
“Yo, son, I heard he umm . . . be switching up teams and shit,” he commented.
DeWayne grinned and shook his head. He had heard it all before and was unmoved by it. “That don’t have shit to do with me, man. As long as he keep helping me to get this money, he can switch up and do whatever the fuck he wanna do.”
Ollie became more persistent with his point. “Yeah, but I’m saying, son, with you hanging around him, the word can get out like you switching teams too and shit.”
D heard that and immediately became defensive. He said, “First of all, I don’t hang out with the motherfucker. It’s all about the business for me, just like you got your business. Do you hang out with your customers and do the shit that they do?”
Ollie thought about it and said, “I smoke the weed. How else am I gonna know how strong the shit is that I’m selling?”
Weed was so prominent in Brooklyn that people hardly bothered to report it. Ollie could sit there on his mother’s front stoop and smoke all of his own supply if he wanted to.
D said, “Well, I ain’t writing or selling no gay shit, so that ain’t even a good example.”
Ollie said, “But you been to jail,” right as D spotted the bus coming.
D turned back to face him and grilled him. “Motherfucker, you saying that to say what? It’s plenty ma-fuckers who went to jail who ain’t been touched.”
Ollie raised his palms high in surrender. “I’m just saying, son, watch yourself in that circle.”
“Nigga, I’ve been dealing with this man for four, five years already, and he ain’t stepped to me once with no gay shit. So what are you really saying right now?”
Ollie shook his head and said, “You arguing with the wrong man, son, I’m just giving you the word to watch yourself.”
As the bus pulled up to take D to the Brooklyn train station, he grilled Ollie one last time before he climbed onboard and said, “Aw’ight, whatever.”
But it wasn’t over with when the doors closed. D was still thinking about it, while grumbling under his breath. “This ma-fucker. People always try’na to fuck up your game.”
“Yo, D, what up, son?” someone yelled from the back of the bus.
DeWayne looked back into the bus and spotted one of his associates from prison, Courtney Davison. The man had tattoos and scars all over his face and body, wearing the full colors of the prison life with a low hair cut and a white wife beater.
“Yo,” D hollered back to him with a nod and a smile.
“When you got a new book coming out?” Courtney asked him. He was proud the boy had become a writer, and D knew the real shit.
He moved closer toward the back to stop their loud yelling. But the bus was too crowded to get a seat back there, so he stood. He said, “I got another one coming out this summer.”
“Oh yeah, what’s the name of this one?”
“Real Gs Never Die,” he answered.
Courtney frowned up his teardrop tattooed face and asked him, “Why is that?” He knew Double D had an explanation for it. Writers had explanations for everything.
“Real Gs become legends who live on for as long as the people continue to talk about them. So I wrote about a character who still influences the next generation of hustlers even from the graveyard.”
Courtney liked the sound of the idea. “I like that, that’s gangsta. You know they reading your books all up in the prison systems now. But they gotta wait for the soft backs to come out to get ’em.”
“Yeah, well, the hardbacks make me more money in the first nine months. Then we go to soft backs.”
D had three hard back books, and six books total, two of which he had self-published. His new book would make four hardbacks and seven total. But as soon as he commented about the money, he remembered that Courtney was locked up for armed robbery.
Shit! I didn’t need to tell this motherfucker that, he reflected. He probably still don’t have no job. Courtney didn’t even look employable. Who would want to hire an uneducated ex-com with tattoos and sca
rs all over his body?
As D continued to inspect his surroundings on the bus, he noticed a curious young man sitting on Courtney’s left, who had been paying strict attention to their conversation. He had the wide-eyed, alert, and exaggerated movements of a gay man. Or at least that’s how D thought about him. Gay men seemed to possess an anxious energy and were overly aware of their surroundings, as if they were trying to send obvious signals that they were gay, while also attempting to figure out who else around them was on their team. DeWayne had been around plenty of turned-out men in prison, so he knew the anxious energy, movements and signals well.
Not wanting to stare at the young man for too long, D looked away from him.
Okay, now I wonder if Courtney’s in here flaming, he mused. Sure enough, as soon as D fell into a stretch of silence, Courtney began to speak to the young man.
“What ’chu up to later on?”
The young man shrugged, in his early twenties, if that. But Courtney was up in his thirties now, while possessing the expressive energies of a much younger man himself.
“I don’t know,” his young friend answered with sweetness on his voice.
As soon as D heard him speak, he confirmed it. Yeah, that nigga flaming so hard he burning the house down. And Courtney got the water hose and the fire engine for him. But fuck it, to each his own, DeWayne concluded. It didn’t have any bearings on his life.
Courtney and his sweet young friend stood to exit the bus before D reached his stop at the train station.
“Aw’ight, D, stay up, son,” Courtney told him with his hand extended.
D thought about the intangibles of shaking his hand but did it anyway. “Aw’ight, man.”
Then his young friend spoke up and smiled. “I like your books.”
“Aw’ight, cool,” DeWayne responded to him with a quick nod.
When they were both gone he breathed easier. Shit. I don’t want no part of that, he insisted. But he had not been so fortunate in prison. Straight men being grabbed up and overtaken in prison was an ugly part of the rehabilitation culture. But what part of rehabilitation was that? So for years now, DeWayne McDonald continued to block it all out, as if it had never happened to him. And even if it did, it wasn’t something that he had chosen to participate in. It had been forced on him, like going to prison in the first place. Who would openly choose to go to jail?
D continued to reflect on it all as entered the Brooklyn subway station.
Look, I survived that shit, man, that’s all I can say. And I don’t fuck around with it, he argued to himself. I know who I am. And that shit don’t touch me now. I’m straight.
Back at the Jacob Javits Center, Natalie Cumberland had found her way over to the Impact Publishing booth to vent to her editor friend, Brittney Enis. It was such a small industry for African-Americans that eighty-five percent of the authors and editors knew each other, or at least had heard about each other.
“Do you believe that?” she was asked Brittney of her situation. “He actually wants me to start a whole new book.”
Jill Miller listened to her gripe, while standing close by them with no comment in their everyday suits and heels. She had advised a few authors to scratch dull book ideas and start over from scratch herself. Every editor had to go through it, particularly with authors who were already signed. The security of a contract made many writers believe that they could publish anything they would like, but the business didn’t work that way. You don’t sign a three-book deal as a mystery writer and then decide that you want to write science-fiction on the second and third books. So Jill listened to the aggravated author with more objectivity.
Brittney was objective about the conversation herself. She hadn’t read Natalie’s new book, but she had read the last two, and she liked them. However, she could see where an African-American readership would have liked more drama. So she leveled with the author.
“Natalie, to be honest with you, the African-American readership seems to be really distracted right now. So, I don’t know if Vincent’s off the mark with that,” she admitted. “I mean, sure, you still have your group of older black women, and some younger readers, who are mature enough to follow a good story without having over the top drama on every other page, but for a lot of the new readers . . . I mean, that’s what they’re reading for, the drama.”
“Well, I don’t believe that,” Natalie disputed. “We just haven’t been marketing the way we used to. We used to market these books with a lot more excitement and activity. But now it’s like we’re just throwing them out there to swim or drown.”
Brittney paused and agreed with her, but with exception. “That’s true, but there’s a lot more books out there to compete with now, so the marketing dollars just aren’t as effective as they used to be.”
It’s like a big waste of money now, she thought and held her tongue. The entire Impact Publishing model was based on frugality and smart viral marketing as opposed to the wasted budgets of throwing rocks into a pond and hoping to hit a big fish. The industry could not afford that anymore, especially with the much smaller sales of black books. The new marketing model had to make sure that you hit your target. So if she was willing to listen, Brittney would advise Natalie to take much less money on her next contract and focus on appealing to the loyal readers that she already had, instead of being so concerned with trying to compete for new readers. At least she could maintain a career that way. But as it stood, the writing was on the wall, and if Natalie was not willing to change her perspective and focus, then she would surely be left behind with no new contract to publish anything.
However, Natalie continued to voice her strong opinions. “Brittney, if we marketed more, we could sell more books. Period! That’s how I got my career started in the first place, through strong marketing.”
Yeah, but that was a dozen years ago, Brittney thought to herself again. We are dealing with new times now, and a new economy too. So unless you’re willing to spend your own money to keep marketing to a decreasing audience, please don’t expect for the publishers to do it. Publisher money doesn’t grow on trees.
In the middle of Natalie’s continued rant, Darlene and Antonio walked into the Impact Publishing booth and looked like a star-studded couple from the glossy magazine pages of Hollywood.
“Haaay, guys, look at you?” Jill addressed them first. Brittney was still occupied with Natalie. But when she spotted Darlene and Antonio, who brightened up and reenergized their space in the room, she obviously couldn’t wait to break away to talk to them. Natalie’s conversation had nowhere to go anyway. She was a sitting duck with no wings, quacking away while the hunters circled around with their guns to shoot her.
“Excuse me,” Brittney told her politely as she angled toward her new visitors. “Hey Darlene, Antonio. I see you two wanted to make a real splash this morning.”
Natalie turned and smiled at them herself. They represented the new blood, where she was now the old, worn-out shoe. And although she remained cordial to them, there was no getting around the facts. The new time had come, and she had no idea of how to compete with them.
On Brittney’s side of the coin, her business vision was crystal clear. She would continue to be friends with Natalie, but she would never go as far as to sign her, and it was all too obvious that Natalie was on her way out the door at Williams & Klein. She was far too difficult to deal with and too set in her ways as an author. The cliché was real, and Brittney had no time for it, nor the money to spend on her. But Darlene Krause . . . she was a totally different story.
Brittney had a vision to immediately cross Darlene over to a more multicultural readership. Her manuscripts already had multicultural characters that they could highlight in samples chapters online. And since Darlene was mixed herself, she was more able to slide into the fuzzy spaces between American race and color codes as a perfect, long-haired video girl, who could write.