Eyeheart Everything (18 page)

Only the crappiest writers publish their own work. They do it because no one else will have them, because they write crap. At least, that is the widely reverberated wisdom: publishing your own book is like tattooing I SUCK DONKEY BALLS across your own forehead. If you are fool enough to do this to yourself, discriminating readers will discriminate against you, critics will chortle, and publishing professionals will refuse their delicious congress. You will die broke and obscure, and if you’re lucky enough to have a tombstone it will read: HE SUCKED ACTUAL DONKEY BALLS.

I knew that might happen — it may still — but I did it anyway, out of desperation and spite, as a salve for a lingering burning sensation in my soul left behind by a totally mismanaged brush with Serious Literature. Now, ten years later, as my oeuvre has continued its stubborn growth and the pain in my heart has receded to sub-bursitus levels, I am re-issuing this book — for technical reasons that I’ll explain — and taking the occasion to re-examine the circumstances that drove me to do it in the first place. Here’s what happened:

It was spring of 1999, my future wife was pregnant with our future child, and we were inspecting our future home for any defects that might later lead to marital collapse. That’s why I was in the basement with my head shoved through a tiny, filthy metal hatch in the root of the central chimney, peering upward at a distant postage stamp of blue sky framed by sketchy brickwork, trying to imagine what a fatally flawed chimney might look like, while my realtor and the homeowner chatted amicably about how to avoid the required permits for things, when Dave Eggers called me on my cell phone.

I had only just gotten a cell phone. They were newish to non-stockbrokers in 1999, and I had not yet developed a good sense of when to ignore the thing. Every conversation was full of novelty and amusement, still: “Hey, guess where I am? I’m driving! I’m at a movie! I’m in a chimney!” Maybe I should have let it go to voicemail, but instead I answered it, cramming my right hand through the hatch to wedge my brand new phone between a sooty brick wall and my head.

“This is Dave Eggers,” said Dave Eggers. He sounded very far away; his voice was weirdly flat and emotionless, as if his cat had just died. (Chimney acoustics may have contributed to this.) He was calling about a story I’d sent to McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. He was thinking about running it in the second issue, because his people had liked it, and he wanted to know how I felt about that. He also wanted me to know that I spell my name funny, and did I really want to spell it that way, and would I mind if he made fun of that spelling in print?

How did I feel about that? A bunch of ways: thrilled, validated, tingly in my extremities, yet wary — why is he calling me up just to say “maybe”? — and apprehensive, because I had only just forsaken an oath to never send my stories to magazines, because it had been such a drawn-out and disappointing torture when I was younger. The very first short story I ever sent out was published right away, but then for years I tried to publish my awful poetry and got nothing but boilerplate rejections from editors, or, worse, encouraging personal rejections from editors who wanted me to try again so they could reject me some more. And in all that time — a five-year initial effort out of high school to “become” a writer and “succeed” — I found many of the editors of these small poetry presses to be unpleasant little Napoleons who only valued other peoples’ poetry as a decorative garnish around their own.

And who needed such jerks? Their cozy universe was being upended by a new, disrupting technology: a powerful communication medium that allowed anyone to broadcast their ideas at incredible speeds over long distances for almost no cost. It went unnoticed at first, but the shock waves from this new invention would eventually rattle the foundations of the publishing world, as it empowered a brave new generation of awful poets to emote more effusively than ever before.

This invention, of course, was the photocopier. My coworkers and I used to molest the one at work by squeezing our genitals against the glass, or chasing the glowing scanner with our teeth to make hideous paper masks of ourselves. Sometimes we would even copy our poems on the poor thing, amplifying their awfulness with the “enlarge” button, and then paste these up on the walls of our offices, or on the doors of the toilet stalls, or on telephone poles around town. Apparently the business cost of telling the employees to quit fucking around with the photocopier was greater than the cost of the photocopies themselves. That was the nineties in a nutshell: insufficient supervision.

So in exchange for access to the unknowable but likely tiny audiences of the small presses, I was quite content, for a while, to circulate little photocopied pamphlets among my friends and through the mail, and in return I received and read fantastically endearing ’zines such as COMETBUS and COOL BEANS and DORIS and others — many, many others, I have a basement full of others, you should stop by someday with a shovel ...

“Hello?” said Dave Eggers.

Sorry, right, here I am, yes. I told Dave I felt great (or awesome, or something like that) about that. It seemed like the correct answer. As for making fun of my name, I said Sure I Guess, although truly I was a bit offended; I actually consider that to be the very lowest form of humor. You will never be able to tell anybody a joke about their name that they haven’t heard a million times already — a truth I’d expect someone named Eggers to know from experience.

But still, this had to be good, right? My story was accepted — well, no, it was maybe’d — by this pretty interesting and nicely designed literary magazine that seemed to have a wide distribution. It was only the second story I’d sent out since I broke my vow — the first came back from The Baffler with an encouraging note along the lines of “send us non-fiction” — so maybe I wasn’t the only person who thought these stories of mine were any good. Perhaps my belief in myself was not wholly unfounded. And Dave Eggers — former editor of Might Magazine, though not yet the massive literary industry he was to become, but still a guy whose work I admired — had called me up to be weird and distant on the phone, and make fun of my name, and say maybe. I think I was supposed to be encouraged by that.

Instead it left me anxious, as did almost everything that spring and summer and fall, as my girlfriend and I bought that house, as we moved in and pulled up the carpet and painted the walls, as her belly ripened like an orange and we got married in front of a judge and signed our lives away to a bank. Everything was changing, everything was exciting and scary. Life was beginning, life was about to end. I hardly told anyone about the McSweeney’s thing because, after all, he only said maybe.

Maybe a month later, as I was packing my extensive collection of heavy useless objects into cardboard boxes so I could throw them away after we moved, Dave Eggers called again. And it was just as awkward: mumbling, long pauses, occasional deep sighs. But this time he was “pretty sure” that my story had been accepted, pending some edits. He was going to e-mail me his notes; he said I could “take it or leave it” regarding those, and then send a draft back. I said Sure, Great, Yes, Awesome, words to that effect. He sounded disappointed.

But this, this was good, right? Could I brag to friends yet? “Pretty sure” seemed promising. But in retrospect I think it was the phrase “take it or leave it” that would derail my subway to stardom. Because I took that to mean I could look at his suggestions, consider each individually, and either take or leave it as I saw fit.

It takes two to miscommunicate, and I did my part. I received his editor’s notes via e-mail, INSERTED IN ALL CAPS directly in the text so as to convey a strong YELLING AT YOU effect. And it’s funny: I just dug out that list of notes today and read it again, and they are very minor edits, very reasonable, actually quite polite — very different from how I’ve remembered them over the last decade. I still don’t agree with every last bit of it, but it’s just little things here and there. Getting all worked up about it would have been pointlessly counter-productive.

But that’s exactly what I did. At the time, those notes bugged the living shit out of me. I still don’t get why. I could blame a typical writer’s blend of ego and insecurity, or the general turbulence in my life at the time, or my lifelong issues with authority, or Dave’s misunderstanding of the importance of the narrator’s verbal tics to a vast novel-length story cycle that I planned to write but of course never did — the point is, I never did figure out how to trust Dave Eggers. I expected the worst. I assumed that at some point he would take away the candy and whip out the stick.

Believing this, I made it so, via a rapidly escalating exchange of defensive, grumpy e-mails over the course of an afternoon, bickering over shit like commas. By the end of the day, this big coup I had begun to believe in — bigger in retrospect, as McSweeney’s went on to become The Next Big Thing in obscure literary magazines — had fallen apart and melted into a little lump of dog shit on the doorstep of my heart.

This is why I cannot have nice things: the Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur Genius Grant, a blurb from Ted Nugent. Because, for all the difficult stuff I am good at, there were too many basic life skills I lacked at the adult age of thirty-two. Maybe still.

So down in flames plummeted the over-inflated zeppelin of my literary aspirations. And yet, I still had this giant pile of homeless stories in my lap. Some of these had appeared in a ’zine I put out irregularly called EYEHEART. Others I had distributed via a little mailing list, just to friends, just to get feedback I thought I could trust. Other stories weren’t even stories, just strange little bits of text that had fallen out of my head, warm-up exercises or whatever, that I couldn’t find it in me to crumple up and recycle. There was a huge stack of this stuff — more than two hundred individually-numbered bits of story, essay, poem, recipe, whatever — and I sought the advice of people I trusted, who told me I needed to publish these stories, somewhere, somehow.

So, having blocked the entrance to Literature for myself, and then having shat in the fire escape, I determined not to go down quietly. I whittled my stack down to about forty things and threw them together into one last ’zine, just to feel like all that time in front of the typing machines had amounted to something. A headstone, basically, for my dead career.

EYEHEART EVERYTHING is that ’zine. I printed it at Kinko’s Copies in the middle of the night, just like all my other ’zines. The pages were cut by giant guillotine, and I stapled the spines and glued the covers myself. My brilliant friend Brady Clark did a fantastic job of the book design. It looked just like a Real Book — most people couldn’t tell the difference. I put it on sale at Reading Frenzy, our local ’zine emporium that used to take consignment of anything with a staple in it. I gave free copies to friends, as always. I abandoned copies on the bus, snuck them into libraries, threw them at cops. I used a copy to steady a wobbly table leg. Any use was a good use.

Then a thing happened: the curator of the small-press section at Powell’s City Of Books in Portland found a copy, liked it, asked for more. Suddenly I had a book featured prominently on the shelves of the largest bookstore on the West Coast. They have been re-ordering ever since.

The two printings of that first hand-bound edition of EYEHEART EVERYTHING add up to about seven hundred copies. And seven hundred sales, over a ten year period, means about as much to a major publisher as seven hundred squirrels farting in outer space. But to me, those sales are like seven hundred flaming pink candles on a bright orange birthday cake. This book opened doors for me everywhere. One copy was read by the CEO of a local entertainment firm and got me employment writing for film and television. Another copy was read by Carlton Mellick III; it begat a long and fruitful friendship and the eventual release of my first novel by Eraserhead Press. A short film was made from one of these stories, and several others were reprinted in various journals, online and off. I’m often asked to read from this book at literary events, or campfires, or weddings, and I always say yes. Best of all, some huge percentage of readers have bothered to track me down and tell me how much they loved this book. Had they not, I’m sure I would have succeeded in my furious effort to fail at writing.

Probably every headstrong young writer believes that they only need to find the audience who loves them for who they are, and that editors just get in the way. Probably every editor believes that writers are like uncut diamonds, in need of vigorous polishing and sharp blows with a chisel in order to realize their full potential. Probably the truth is somewhere in the middle. Looking back at this collection, I sure wish I’d had an editor. I see things I should have thrown away and things I should have sent to Granta or The New Yorker — some of my best work, and some total crap, and nobody but myself in charge of knowing the difference. It was a snapshot taken at a poignant pivot point in my life. Ten years later, it’s a historic document. Someday it might be valuable.

Many things happened to me in the intervening decade. We had that child. We bought that house. We got married a second time, in the backyard so everybody could watch. I did some journalism, some screen writing — I was once paid more than thirty thousand dollars to write fewer than ten lines of dialogue for a major motion picture — and I played a lot of music and wrote a lot of software and rode a lot of bicycles. Powell’s continued to sell one or two or three copies of EYEHEART EVERYTHING every month, and I continued to manufacture more copies for them, ten or twenty at a time. I hot-glued the covers, and my daughter applied the little stickers with the ISBN barcodes — an absolutely crucial element of any professional book cover, by the way, and one that Brady and I forgot to include in the design, amateurs that we were.