We talked a bit more, and then he said, “Are you working on anything in particular at the moment, Tom?”
I had ordered Annie not to submit Happy Happy Happy to Craig. “Oh, this and that,” I said.
“The reason I ask, I presented a book idea to Mr. Wilson, and he said okay, and now I’m supposed to find a writer.”
Have bygones ever more swiftly become bygones? “Well, I’m not actually tied up with other work, Dewey,” I said. “What is this book?”
“The history of video games.”
“The history of video games?” It hadn’t occurred to me that video games had been around long enough to have a history.
But apparently so. “Sure,” he said. “From the earliest chess computers, and forerunners like pinball and slot machines. And don’t forget Tommy!”
“Tommy?”
“Tommy, the Pinball Wizard, the rock opera by The Who. There’s a historic moment in pop culture!”
“Ah,” I said. The old Dewey had not been entirely repressed after all.
“I’m afraid I can’t offer you much more than you got on The Christmas Book,” he said. “Your share, I mean.”
My mouth dry, I said, “But a little more, surely?” as though we were all just calmly bandying words about.
“Well, I guess everybody has to get a little more every time,” he said, and laughed self-consciously. “I’m starting to learn this business.”
I was dying to ask him about his father, but I was afraid it would embarrass him; and maybe he didn’t know about that call. I said, “I’ll have Annie phone you, work out the details.”
“Annie?”
“My agent,” I said. “Have you learned that much about the business?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I know about agents. They’re always trying to pull something.”
“Not my Annie,” I assured him. “She’s very motherly and nice. You’ll like her.”
“Okay,” he said doubtfully. Then he promised again to messenger the book, and we hung up, and he did messenger the book, and here it is!
And I’m about to get big bucks for another book!
And I’m back with Mary, back in the bosom of my family and loving it!
Life is okay after all.
Friday, October 14th
At eight a.m. yesterday morning, the printers and warehousemen and other skilled craftsmen at the Heritage Consolidated Press in Potted Pine, Pennsylvania, went out on strike. Clerical workers and other employees left at noon, in sympathy. The union contract expired last June thirtieth, and the employees have been working without a contract while negotiations have continued. The employees decided to go out at this precise moment because Heritage Consolidated was about to start on its single largest order of the year: The Christmas Book.
As usual, a union goes on strike to pressure not the employer but some third party — in this case, Craig, Harry & Bourke — in hopes the third party will apply direct pressure on the employer to settle the dispute to the union’s satisfaction. According to Robert Wilson, head honcho at Craig, who phoned me personally this morning to give me the news — this is perhaps the third time I’ve spoken with him in my life — this time the union’s strategy is unlikely to work. Not only does Craig have very little pressure it can bring to bear on Heritage Consolidated, but Heritage Consolidated has apparently been prepared to shut this plant down for some time — they have others, mostly in the south — and are willing to treat an extended strike as a de facto closing, which would be a lot cheaper than if the deed were done the proper way, with severance pay and all the rest of it.
Unless the strike is settled by the end of next week, there will be no copies of The Christmas Book at Christmas.
Because of Annie’s reversion clause, if there is no Christmas Book this year, there is no Christmas Book.
There is no Christmas Book.
Friday, November 25th
I am still recuperating from yesterday, Thanksgiving Day. A true harvest festival, the closest thing in Puritan America to real hedonism, the one day a year when gluttony is not only acceptable but required. (Another of the seven deadly sins memorialized.)
While it is true that the first Thanksgiving Day was celebrated as a sit-down harvest gala among the early Pilgrims and some tame neighborhood Indians, the feast did not become a national holiday until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation on the subject. Proclamations kept the holiday alive year by year until 1941, when Congress made it a permanent addition to the American calendar.
Lincoln’s proclamation — Thanksgiving, not emancipation — was done at the urging of one Sarah Josepha Hale, then editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, who was also the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” among other works, and who, an ardent feminist, persuaded Vassar Female College, founded in 1861, to delete the word “Female” from its name in 1867. If she’d stopped to think how many American women down through the decades would be struggling to cook (without drying them out) twenty-two pound turkeys on the fourth Thursday of every November, she might well have told Lincoln to forget it.
It’s been six weeks since I added anything to this history; not since labor and management got together out there in Pennsylvania to kill my baby. I understand the strike is still going on, is likely to last a lot longer, and has begun to spread to some of the company’s southern plants as well. It looks as though both sides are going to suffer a lot. Good.
There is no Christmas Book, but good things did come of it. The money, for instance; the lack of a book wasn’t my fault, nor the contributors’ fault, so we all got to keep our payments. And then there’s Highest Previous Score, which is our working title for the history of video games. Since my track record now includes the money I was paid for The Christmas Book, Annie got me a much higher advance for Highest Previous Score than would have happened last year. (Beat my highest previous score, in fact.) Also, Dewey continues to combine contriteness for past misdeeds with a wonderful galumphing enthusiasm for this new book, so it may even get good support from the company when it comes out next September. (It’ll be next year’s Craig, Harry & Bourke Christmas book, of course.)
And video games are really interesting when you get to know about them, in a way. Sort of. Well, bearable, anyway. (There’s something I wouldn’t tell anybody but Mary, which is the truth: Video games are even more boring to read about and write about than to play. But what I am is a professional, and what Highest Previous Score is is what they’ll pay me to write. Listen, it could be Erik Estrada’s autobiography.)
But what made me think about The Christmas Book again is something that came in the mail today, from Pompano Beach, Florida: a birth announcement. “Mr. and Mrs. Harold J. Goldbaum are pleased to announce the birth of their daughter, Tiffany Rachel Goldbaum,” etcetera. At first I couldn’t figure out why Mr. and Mrs. Harold J. Goldbaum, of whom I have never before heard, wanted to share this glad news with me, but then all at once the penny dropped and I said out loud, “Vickie!”
Has to be. I counted backward, and from what she told me she should be almost due now, so she dropped the kid a couple weeks early, which would be very much in character, she being sort of jumpy and neurotic and impatient. I cannot begin to picture Harold, but whoever he is he clearly didn’t stand a chance.