Authors: Tom Winton
"You mean like money? How much, Dad? How much?" Dawn asked.
I turned my eyes to Maddy's and I said, "Would you believe, eight, thousand, dollars!"
Maddy's face went pale. Her eyes got all froggy and her jaw fell. "Eight thousand dollars … Dean, pinch me … tell me you're not kidding."
"Yeah, honey, EIGHT LARGE!" I noticed her eyes had reddened. A solitary quiet tear dripped from her eyelash. The rogue cheek-roller traversed the side of her face. I stepped toward her and took her in my arms.
You have to understand what this money meant to Maddy Frances; she was the one who paid the bills. She wrote out all the checks. She was the one who mailed our sweat money off to opportunistic banks, utility companies, and all the rest. She was the one who for months had supplemented our shrinking incomes with plastic after Searcy's had cut my commission rate from six to five percent. Here we were, both of us working, living in an old house in a rapidly declining neighbourhood--without any loans to pay--and we still had to use credit cards to pay for each month's unexpected bills. Then, on top of that, during Florida's summer months, the furniture business falls off fifty-percent. Forget incidentals! Just to subsist we had to use those instant-plastic-loans with their usurious interest rates.
Like most of the silent majority, Maddy and I were working harder and harder for much less. We couldn't even afford badly-needed dental attention for ourselves or our kids. I'd been chewing on the left side of my mouth for two years since a cracked porcelain cap on the right side kept coming off. Maddy and I each needed a couple of new crowns, and none of us had a physical exam in years. And to think they call such examinations 'routine'. For us, any dental care or medical attention, excepting emergencies, had become an unaffordable luxury. We'd never once owned a new car. Didn't want the payments. Instead we always drove around in two beaters. The van and the Skylark both ran like tired mules. Every mile we squeezed between repairs seemed like a gift. But now, these eight thousand dollars actually put us in the black.
We paid off the forty-four-hundred-dollar balance on those cards we'd used so judiciously and, despite Maddy's heavy resistance, I finally talked her into buying some much-needed clothes for herself. Not being much of a shopper, Maddy never was much for malls or mega-shopping centers. She only went to them when it was absolutely necessary. And she was as adamant about not buying designer clothes as I was. We both realized how foolish it is to actually pay for clothes with designers' names plastered all over them. For what, so we could pay ten times what they were worth rather than five, so we could make some mindless-status claim? Nope, I-don't-think-so! Neither of us could even begin to fathom how anyone would actually buy 'billboard-clothing', let alone pay exorbitant prices for that sweatshop junk.
Along with the few new things Maddy did buy, we got the kid's teeth fixed. And the van's A/C too. With the last eight hundred, we opened a savings account that paid a piddling four-percent interest. (Yeah, I know. Today they're paying even less). I swear I wanted to just keep the money in a dresser drawer, not participate in the bank's scam. But, at the time, there had been a rash of cat-burglaries in our neighborhood and Maddy felt better keeping our life savings, no matter how small, in a bank.
Despite all the negativity that shrouded our world, my family and I savored the good news I'd brought home that day. And that night, when we went to bed, Maddy Frances and I fell asleep, as we had thousands of times, in each other's arms. But something was very different. There were contented smiles on our faces. I distinctly remember that. I also remember waking up in the middle of that night, lifting my head from the pillow and looking oh so lovingly at my sleeping wife's peaceful face. Then I fell back to sleep and dreamed about Theresa Wayman.
Chapter 25
The next nine months absolutely doddered by. Each day felt like three. But, they did pass. And finally, in late March of '94, Olympus Books released the first copies of 'Look What They've Done To Our Dream'. The wait had been agonizing. For nine months the anticipation gestated inside me, each day growing weightier and harder to carry. But eventually, when I finally held a copy of the book in my hands, (though it's easy to say when it's all over), every punishing minute I had waited seemed well worth it. I was utterly euphoric that early spring day when it arrived by overnight mail. It was like all the Christmas mornings of my life jammed into one. I tore at that cardboard envelope like a kid does at the biggest gift under the tree.
"Easy," Maddy cautioned, her face alive with excitement, "you'll damage the book … Jees, Dean … look at you. Your hands are trembling."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," I said as I wrestled the bubble-wrapped book from the cardboard Fed-Ex envelope. Then, standing side-by-side alone with my wife in the living room, we got our first glimpse of my novel.
"Dammm," I said, "look at this cover, Maddy. It's perfect."
As we studied it, she draped an arm around my waist, lodging a thumb in a belt loop of my Levis. The cover was a real grabber; star-spangled red, white, and blue. Beneath the title, in the center of a circle of white stars, was a graphic of a harried family standing in front of a small austere cement-block house. There was a husband, a wife and a baby. The adults were leaving for work, kissing goodbye next to two jalopies parked in the driveway, the infant whaling in the distraught mother's arms. A ball and chain was tethered to each parent's ankle. "Man," I said, "if that doesn't say it all. It-is-perfect."
Beneath this moving image, in bold blue print, was my name, DEAN CASSIDY. I read it to myself, three times. All I could say was, "Dammmm."
Rubbing my back by now in quick little circles, Maddy said, "It is perfect! Open it, Dean … to the back inside flap."
I was so excited, I fumbled the book, catching it mid-fall with a nervous stab of hands. "Real slick," I said as I opened the back cover. And there it was. My picture! The grainy black and white bust shot of my good side that I had picked out. You see (against our normally-frugal judgments), Maddy and I had paid a moon-lighting photographer to come to the house and snap some shots. We wanted the jacket picture to be perfect. I was real glad now that we had sprung for the seventy-five smackers. The picture looked damn good, if I must say so myself.
"Honey, you look sooo handsome," Maddy Frances said.
I was posed in our backyard, in front of one of the tall Areca palms. Half smiling, I had on my favorite shirt, my old, blue-denim work shirt. The top three buttons were open, exposing my K-Mart, twenty-nine-dollar, silver neck chain. Still scrutinizing the picture, I told Maddy, "I have to admit, I do look kinda spiffy."
After that, we checked out the back cover. There were four blurbs, each giving praise to the book and author. The most impressive comments were made by best-selling author, Peter Hynchon. I read them to Maddy. "A beautifully written novel that masterfully illustrates what dark depths life has sunk to in these once United States, a true-to-life depiction, the likes of which you'll not read about in any newspaper nor see on the evening news, a perceptive, sensitive, passionate, heart-wrenching, utterly-beautiful debut novel. Brothers and sisters, meet Dean Cassidy, I expect he'll be around for a long, long time to come."
"I wonder if Peter Hynchon actually read it," I mused aloud.
"Of course, he did. Nobody's going to say all those nice things about a book they didn't even read."
"Often they do, Maddy."
"Maybe so, but all I know is it's one terrific story. People will love it."
"First they'll have to buy it," I said dubiously. There was that nagging inherent knack again, that talent I have for finding the darkest side of anything, no matter how good.
"They will buy it, Dean. That's why Fran arranged the tour next month. You'll sell books at those stores. People will read them, love them, and tell all their friends how good it is. Readers will identify with what you've written … that's the most important ingredient. You said so yourself."
"Yeah, it is," I murmured as I opened to a random page. I read a few lines to Maddy and instantly our smiles returned. Then I closed the book gently and looked at my wife. An unfamiliar contented ring chimed in my voice when I said, "You know, Maddy … no matter what happens next, this has been some thrill for both of us. Heck, we even got some money, and there'll be more. Not much, probably, but there will be more. I'm not going into this thing with stars in my eyes but, shoot, even if we just got three or four thousand more, it would be great. But, that's not what this is all about," I added, wiggling the book, "we've had the thrill of getting it published. That means far more than the money, no matter how badly we need it."
Maddy looked at me adoringly. She said, "That attitude, Mister Author, is exactly why people will enjoy reading what you have to say. There's nothing contrived in there, no phony sensationalism. It's all authentic. Your heart is on every page, Dean, and that's why people will love it."
Soon enough we would find out if she was right or wrong.
I knew all too well what the odds of success were. I knew how God-awfully tough it is to get readers to buy something by an unknown author. I'd read somewhere that only two percent of the American public can afford to buy hard covers on a regular basis. And that they usually buy books by those big-name, established writers, those authors who always seem to have a title, sometimes two at once, on the best seller lists. With thousands of writers and many more wannabees pumping out manuscripts every year, it's amazing how the same handful of mostly-mediocre writers always have something in the top ten.
Nevertheless, I can't begin to describe how thrilled I was that, out of the hundreds of thousands of unsolicited manuscripts stacked in publishing house slush piles throughout the industry, mine had been chosen from one such paper mountain. Just the fact it had made it 'over the transom', as they say, and into print, was truly remarkable, and damn lucky!
But, my struggle was nowhere near over. There would still be more obstacles. After all, for every goal we achieve in life, isn't there always another more important, more challenging one waiting right behind it--sometimes more than one, waiting in the wings? Beyond my achievement of getting the book published and released, was the looming tour, and after that, the bottom line - sales.
For the next month, until the tour began, I remained true to form, agonizing about how it might go. Would 'Look What They've Done to Our Dream' be reasonably successful, or would it be a horrendous flop? You can imagine which way my mind leaned during those four weeks.
Chapter 26
Although Skip Frampton, the store manager at Searcy's, acted as if it was costing him blood, he finally gave me permission to take my vacation a month earlier than scheduled. How was I to know exactly when my tour would start? He pitched and bitched about how tough it would be to cover the sales floor with one less body. It didn't matter that he always flooded the floor with too many salespeople anyway. He loved to hire on more than we needed so that we'd all be good and hungry, so that when their few turns came to wait on customers, the salespeople would really work them over, try every trick and scheme imaginable, and some that weren't, so they could, as Frampton put it, "Get into their damn checkbooks." Then, as bad as conditions were, once Searcy's instituted that commission cut, even most of the honest associates began to lie, cheat and steal in an attempt to scrape together a half a living. It was a hell of an atmosphere, like working in a combat zone.
Every time Frampton broke my shoes about the vacation, I wanted in the worst way to tell him to kiss my ass. I wanted to quit, on the spot. But I managed to restrain myself, knowing I'd still need the soulless job when I returned from the tour. You would have thought he'd gladly have let me have time off, think it was pretty neat that I'd gotten a book published and all. But that shit didn't mean squat to ole Skip, a seventy-six-year-old man who'd never read anything other than business publications, the type of person who spends his entire life focused on only one thing, making money. Skip Frampton thought that since he was 'over' thirty-odd people, and he and his wife drove new twin BMWs every year, each with matching colors, appointments and cutesy vanity plates, that he had the answers to all of life's questions. But, like all such provincial-thinking know-it-alls, he'd never in his entire naïve life had clue one as to what the big picture is all about. Sometimes when I looked at this man, I'd think back to my childhood on the streets of Queens. I'd think how most of the underclass kids I had known knew more about life at thirteen than this mindless, pampered executive ever would.