A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to My Whoredom

This post is a thank you to my subscribers and readers.

It isn’t going to sound like one at the beginning.

But bear with me.

I’ll get there.

• • •

I didn’t want to write this today. I wanted to work on my novel, which is just now beginning to form in the deep space of my being, like a planet, drawing towards it thoughts and ideas from the far reaches of the unknowable universe of this swirling self, forming words and matter from elements both essential to me and unknown to me, a mystical phenomenon that can only be brought about by constant force, by relentless attention, by a stubborn focus on the unseeable which soon brings forth from the dark matter of one’s soul an Earth of life.

But I couldn’t.

Because it’s Friday.

And I have to write this.

This.

Fucking.

Substack.

Shit.

(I’m not at the thank you yet)

• • •

Years ago, in early nineties, I was riding my motorcycle in the Chelsea part of NYC when the bike coughed, sputtered and died. A newb before anyone used the word “newb,” I had run out of gas. It was late, well past midnight, and I was on a dark, deserted cross street on the far west side of the city. I was sure I was going to get mugged, my new bike stolen. I began pushing the bike towards the highway, where I remembered passing a gas station, but the bike was heavy and it was slow going. Suddenly I heard footsteps behind me, and I spun around to find a tall transgender prostitute standing at the tail of the bike, her hands on the seat cowl, getting ready to push.

“Give you a hand?” she asked. “Slow night for me anyway.”

I wasn’t sure she was going to be much help, what with her four-inch heels, but we got the bike rolling and began to chat as we pushed it west. She asked me about the bike, told me she thought them too dangerous, which I thought funny given her line of work. She laughed, and assured me she could take care of herself - as long as she was on two heels and not two wheels.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I’m a writer,” I said.

“Books?”

“Someday.”

“What do you do now?” she asked.

“I work for an ad agency,” I said.

“Oh,” she said as we pushed the bike over the curb into the gas station parking lot. “So we do the same thing, then.”

She smiled, waved goodbye and walked off down the empty avenue.

• • •

It’s been suggested by some that if Mark Twain hadn’t spent so much of his time traveling the country to promote his books, he would have written twice as many of them.

I wonder if he lived today – with the endless self-promotion required of authors, the Tik Toks and the Instas and the Snaps and the writing fake reviews on GoodReads and Amazon and yes, the Substacks – if he would have ever even written the ones he did?

• • •

• • •

I’m sure you’ve had this happen to you, usually at a party you don’t really want to be at: someone, usually drunk, comes over and says, “You’re a writer? Boy, I’ll tell you, I wish I had time to write.”

I used to think, “Go fuck yourself.”

Today, in this day of endless self-promotion, of tweets and followers and likes and Book Tok, I think, “Yeah, we writers wish we had time for that, too.”

• • •

A few years ago, I had a TV series on Showtime called Happyish. It concerned a man who worked in advertising, struggling to find the very thing he kept promising consumers: happiness. It was dark and funny and it had Hitler directing a Coke commercial and a Keebler elf killing the other elves before turning the gun on himself. A family show. Halfway through the first season, the head of the network phoned, his voice heavy, and told me the audience numbers weren’t great.

“How not great?” I asked.

“Bad.”

“How bad?”

He sighed.

“We’re only at 400,000,” he said.

Reader, I came.

“Four hundred thousand?” I said. “Holy fuck, that’s like half a million!”

He wasn’t as impressed as I was.

“We need a million,” he said.

A million? I thought. Are you out of your mind? Dude, have you read my books? Did you even read the treatment? In the season finale, the main character finds God when he discovers a shit stain in his underpants that looks like Jesus. Exactly like Jesus. This isn’t Everybody Loves Raymond, motherfucker. 400,000 is amazing.

He phoned again, a few months later, to tell me that the show had been cancelled.

See that’s the problem with the numbers game: you can’t win, because once you start paying, no number is ever enough.

I mention this now because I just passed a personal milestone of subscribers here on Substack (this is the thank you bit). I have a bit of a fetish for the truth, and the truth is that I only started this Substack - as @MarkTwain might have – to promote my forthcoming book. I felt shitty about launching it, like just another whore on social media, but what choice did I have? We are born astride a grave, wrote Beckett; lately it seems we are born on a stripper pole. But a funny thing happened on the way to my Whoredom:

I began to enjoy it.

And I still do.

I like the freedom of being able to write that which would never find a home anywhere else.

I like the weekly exercise of writing a finished piece (even on days like today, when I’d rather be working on the novel).

And most of all I like the readers here on Substack – you’re funny, smart, engaged, lively. For a guy with as little faith in mankind as I have, curled up in the fetal position even after three decades of therapy, this is invaluable.

So (here it is):

Thank you.

Truly.

For reading. For subscribing. But most of all for reaching out, for commenting, for laughing, for getting the joke and for jumping in.

As far as stripper poles go, this is a pretty damn good one.

Yours in the fetal position,

S.

site illustrations by orli auslander