Scream (14 page)

Maybe it would have happened anyway.

looking for work

A
fter my graduation, after my guest editorship, I applied for a job at the Condé Nast magazines. Everyone who ever did this after having a guest editorship was pretty much always offered a job, even if only a miserable entry-level position.

Weeks went by and I was back home in Mom's bleak little tract house by the interstate highway outside of Boston. I was still upset about the blouse.

My mother was indignant that my job had been to iron. “You've never been able to iron!” But she suggested I write a letter to the editor apologizing and explaining how this terrible incident had occurred. We wrote it together. It started out reasonably, and then, as the two of us perfected it, became a masterpiece easily equal to Eudora Welty's short story “Why I Live at the P.O.”

Now
this
was a letter. If you ever want to know what it was like to have fun, it was my mom and me writing this letter. Writing things like “Well, 'nuff said.” Could three words be more supremely irritating? Could three words be more wrong?

If you write a letter like that, it's letter-as-performance-art.

I sent the letter to the editor and my mother and I eagerly awaited a response.

There was none, nor was I offered a job at Condé Nast.

A few years later, I found myself back in that building on my same old floor. Many faces were the same. Some kept a wide berth. Finally an editor did stop by briefly and asked, “Aren't you the one who wrote The Letter?” Her eyes widened with fear as she scuttled off down the hall.

WHEN I DIDN'T GET A JOB
with a New York magazine, I moved home to my mom's tiny house on the side of the eight-lane highway and started applying for work.

I had always thought I should go into advertising. It seemed to me that this was a very legitimate and honest form of writing. Because what you did there, as a writer, was to try and sell a product. You were not pretending otherwise. You were not making bad art or literature under the guise that you were an Artist. You were doing a job, a real working job, that sold a product. You were earning a living, and you were doing something somewhat creative, but you were not pretending it was for any other reason than to sell something. Since my mom and I lived alone together, we read and read and had very pure, isolated ideas about Art and Writing. So much had been published, which, in its day, was touted as being great, but wasn't. And the books and works of art that were, in their time, given great critical acclaim and praise ended up being—to us, anyway, really bad. I'm not talking about
Catcher in the Rye,
which had always seemed pretty stupid to us. I'm talking about
Raintree County
and
By Love Possessed, Boston Adventure,
Look Homeward, Angel
and
Ulysses,
and an entire first two-thirds of the twentieth century dominated by male writers who were actually pretty lousy but about whom you weren't allowed to say anything.

At least in advertising I would be avoiding this preposterous court of idiocy. So I put together a portfolio of copywriting and illustrated it. I included a lot of things I had done in college, like playbills for a theater group. And . . . I got an interview! This was a big deal, actually getting an interview for a job. I needed this opportunity.

I believed that I was interviewing for a position as a copywriter. The ad agency, however, thought I was there to interview for a position as a receptionist in the accounting department. I don't know how this discrepancy arose, but I did know it was a good idea to dress up for an interview. So I put on my black spike-heeled boots and a suede mini-skirt and other punk items I had gotten in England the year before that had not yet reached the fashion shore of Boston and I strutted into that interview.

Because of the drawings that illustrated my copy, they called and hired me as assistant art director. Now that I was hired, I decided that as a working girl my costume should be a plaid kilt, brogues, a button-down shirt, and a cardigan.

On my first day of the job, everyone gathered around to greet me. Except for women in subsidiary positions, only men worked there. But as I resembled a 1950s schoolgirl, I was not the person they expected. Immediately, all my confidence vanished. The person they were waiting for was, I think, in retrospect, a dominatrix.

I was sent to a remote office and assigned various tasks. My first assignment was to draw a storyboard with a cowboy resembling John Wayne who walks into a bar and orders a can of Underwood Deviled Ham. I could not do this. First I had to find out what a storyboard was. Once I found out, I went to the library every night and traced pictures of cowboys and then tried to draw cowboys, and even if I could draw a cowboy from one angle I could not draw the same cowboy from a different angle. Night after night, I cried and cried.

At the end of the first week I was called into the conference room. “Are you ready to present your Cowboy Ordering Underwood Deviled Ham in a Bar?”

I held up my grimy five-foot-tall storyboard. The members of the ad team and the rest of the account executives looked at it for a long time and then said politely, “Thank you.”

Then they sent me back to my office.

They tried to find other things for me to do. My boss asked me to reframe some pictures for him by taking the pictures out of the frames and turning the mattes backward and putting them back in the frames, but when he came to collect them at the end of the day I was sitting on the floor crying and the pictures were ruined.

After that, they left me alone. A month or so later there was a new hire at the agency. Her name was Valerie. She was lovely. The agency was really trying to make things equal, where women would be hired as well as men!

Valerie and I went out to lunch. “So, Tama, what is it you
do
exactly at the agency?” she asked.

“Valerie, I don't know how to answer that. I don't know. I don't exactly
do
anything here. People have tried to find things for me to do, but thus far, I come here every day and I get a paycheck.”

After lunch, she told me she had a meeting with our boss.

After her meeting, I was laid off.

I would never be able to work in an office, or anywhere, I knew that now. With the stressful life I had led until that time, and the constant fear of poverty, truly, I would have been content with any job, a job with a paycheck, benefits, comradeship. But it was not to be.

transgender publishing outing

I
went back to school. I found a one-year master's degree program that offered a full scholarship plus a little money to live on at Hollins College, a lovely women's college in Virginia that predated the Civil War.

It harkened back to an earlier era, to that time when women of fine backgrounds went to finishing school to be finished. In 1978 it was an undergraduate college that primarily consisted of women who brought their own horses and Mercedes. But twelve young men and women had been accepted into a new graduate creative writing program.

At Hollins, I wrote my first book,
American Dad
.

I was taking an independent study, but when I handed in what I had been working on my teacher couldn't be bothered to read it. I begged him, but he was disgruntled and didn't want to take the time. What would become of me? Could I write? And what should I do with this book? I didn't know what to do.

There was a visiting professor, William Goyen, who was helpful and kind and gave me the names of two editors at publishing houses. Six months after sending the manuscript to them, one sent it back. The other said she would publish it. She had me rewrite and rewrite and revise. She said if I did what she wanted, she would definitely publish it. After a year of rewriting she called and said, “It did not pass the editorial meeting. Sorry.”

I put it back, pretty much, to the way I wanted it. I sent out sections of this book to different magazines. I sent chapters to
Esquire
and
The Paris Review
. They were rejected.

The manuscript was written in the first-person point of view of a boy. I decided I would take those same chapters and send them out with a man's name on them. I decided to call myself Tom A. Janowitz.

This time the work received a different response. A woman editor at
Esquire
wrote to me: “I really like what you are doing here, Tom. It's not quite ready yet, but I think I can help. We can work together. If you are in New York City, how about I take you to lunch?”

I was too chicken. Her letter was a little flirtier than what I have described above.

Simultaneously, letters from
Who's Who of American Authors
used to come in for my mom.

RESPOND NOW TO BE INCLUDED IN OUR LATEST EDITION
,
AVAILABLE FOR SPECIAL DISCOUNT RATE $79 TO PURCHASE BUT YOU WILL BE INCLUDED ANYWAY
.

My mom always responded, hoping her being listed might lead to something, even though we didn't have the money to buy the actual product. This time, we decided she should—and did—write on her bio that she was the mother
of two sons
. We were trying to prove that maybe things hadn't changed that much since the Brontë sisters wrote under pseudonyms, men's names. Currer Bell got published. George Eliot got published. George Sand.

The phone rang. “Hi, could I speak to Tom?”

“Tom, it's for you,” my mother said.

I picked up the phone. “This is
The Paris Review
. We are calling you to tell you we have accepted your story.”

“What? Really?”

“Tom?”

“Yes. Well . . . actually.”

“I thought you were the author?”

“I am.”

“Oh . . .”

The editor sounded disappointed not to have discovered a young male writer, but Tom finally had his first work accepted! By
The Paris Review,
no less.

Months went by, but my excerpt did not appear in the magazine. A year went by. And I was broke and they were going to pay me $150. I contacted the editors there. “I hope you will soon publish my piece; it would mean so much to me to have the book from which this excerpt was taken include this fantastic credit.” (I had finally found a publisher but still hadn't gotten paid the small advance.)

“In that case we can't publish your piece,” George Plimpton said. “We don't publish pieces that have been published elsewhere.”

“Please!” I said. “It's been a couple of years, can't you squeeze it into the magazine before the book comes out?”

My mom called him, begging him and saying how upset I was. It was that prestigious to get into
The Paris Review
. At the last minute they did publish that excerpt. And after I begged for another year or so I did get my $150. But, apparently as punishment for begging, I never did get invited to one of Plimpton's literary soirees. And when he asked me to read at a fundraiser anniversary, although all the other speakers (all men) got to read from their own work that had been published in
The
Paris Review,
I was made to read a poem by someone else—a bad poem.

A few months before
American Dad
was published, the editor and the publicist asked me who I would like to have “blurb” my book. So I gave them a list of every author I admired or who might help by writing something about a first novel by a young author.

After a few weeks went by they asked me if I had gotten any of the blurbs.

“But . . . you expected
me
to get the blurbs? You asked me for a list of who I wanted—I don't know where these people live or anything.”

“Oh. Well, I'll find you the addresses,” said the publicist. “I'm too busy, though.
You
write to them and, um, you can sign
my
name and give my number, then they'll write back to me if they are interested and I will send them the galleys.”