|
|
HOW I BECAME DUMB AND HAPPY
My first afternoon as a free man had just shifted into high gear. Around the time I would normally be struggling to show Jack and his cadre of applepolishers why their pie-in-the-sky projections were simply impossible in the real world, I was beguiling the kids, as well as myself, with my dazzling prospects in bestsellerdom.
"You take Michael Crichton's high concept, Tom Wolfe's powers of social observation, add a dash of Scott Fitzgerald's romanticism and maybe some of Dostoyevski's pyschological intensity, then you have a pretty fair picture of what my book will be like." The kids approved. Not that they had read Dostoyevski or Tom Wolfe yet, but the names were familiar enough to impress. "Then can we can move back into a bigger house with a swimming pool?" asked Dirk, ever the bottom-line guy. "Sure, soon as I get my advance check." The fact that I had written less than a double-spaced page hardly seemed important. A few minutes before our usual dinnertime Lucy called. "Would you mind popping some TV dinners in the oven. It's crazy here." She started in on details of how her friend's company, a tech startup, was growing so fast that they were weeks behind on even basics like billing. "Don't sweat it, Babycake," I said, cutting her short. "It's all under control." In truth it was. The heady possibilities of a bestselling life had me and the kids aglow. World travel, yacht, mansion with tennis court and screening room -- everything was possible. We hardly missed Lucy as we continued dreaming over our TV dinners. "I'm so glad you decided to become a writer, Dad," said Becky a little breathlessly before heading up to do her homework. There was something like hero-worship in her eyes. That made up for the morning's moments of truly awful doubts. Chin Boy indeed! Let them say that with my name on the New York Times bestseller list! Within days we all figured out that Lucy's part-time job was actually a time-and-a-half job. She blossomed on its demands. Her face radiated the kind of smug, beatific energy I had rarely seen when she was a power mother. I didn't mind. For my part the sense of grim martyrdom that had encrusted my psyche around the act of getting ready each morning slowly peeled away in layers like an onion. As I drove the kids to school I secretly pinched myself to be sure I wasn't dreaming. Was it really possible to lead a life in which each morning wasn't an ordeal drenched in resentment, dread and simmering anger? I actually began looking forward to waking up, sinfully enough. I felt as though I had awakened from some interminable nightmare, released from some malign spell. There was only one problem. My book. The fictional world seemed to have its own laws of physics which were at least as restrictive as those in the real world. Those laws seemed to prohibit the very actions I had planned for my characters. I began despairing of ever finishing anything that might engage the emotions of another human being, much less compel some publisher to tear off a seven-figure advance. Three months after I had quit my job I was toiling over a simple scene that somehow refused to come to life when Lucy called. As usual she began by apologizing for interrupting my writing. Thoroughly carried away by her work, she always assumed that my days too consisted of being blissfully borne along on the sheer momentum of feverish productivity. |
"We need you," she said. "Our company needs you." She went on to explain that their marketing VP had just been wooed away by another company that was much closer to an IPO. What made it a genuine three-alarm crisis was that their second-stage venture capital financing meeting was set for the end of the week. They needed a seasoned marketer with the right kind of blue-chip experience. "I know nothing about your company," I protested, even as another part of me recognized the soundness of Lucy's instinct in calling me. How many marketers with my credentials and experience could they find sitting around on his duff? I also breathed a sigh of relief. I welcomed a bit of comic relief from the sheer hell of reworking a passage for the eighth time. This not being an essay on the craziness that once prevailed in the world of tech startups, I will skip most of the sordid and absurd details. Several months later, long before the company's planned IPO, it was bought out by a giant corporation that decided buying us was cheaper and quicker than trying to assemble comparable technical team from scratch. That made me an irrelevant piece of corporate flotsam and I again found myself a free man. I was delighted. For having taken the trouble of donning a clean polo and long pants to participate in about a dozen meetings, I had received a bunch of options which magically became transformed into several thousand shares of a high-priced blue-chip company. Not quite the same as a seven-figure advance, but earned with a lot less sweat! What's more, it took some pressure off my writing and armed the family with a story of our own little hi-tech payday. Dumb luck, you say? I've learned that sometimes you have to let yourself look dumb to enjoy dumb luck. And sometimes nothing makes you look smarter than a bit of dumb luck. It's been two years now since I jumped off the forty-fifth floor. Oh sure, my mother still frets about my prospects. She still bemoans the loss of bragging rights among cronies. But she likes the fact I visit her a lot more often. She tells me about friends who have successful kids who never visit. "How many degrees you need to visit your mother?" she now says, without a trace of irony. I still haven't finished my bestseller but continue to make steady progress. I'm still hoping for that fat advance check but my self-worth is no longer tied to it any more than it's tied to the size of my old office on the forty-fifth floor. During my time away from that office with all its ready-made prestige, I've learned that having others see worth in me isn't the same thing as seeing my own self-worth. Nowadays my fix of self worth comes largely from my many small personal contributions to the happiness of my family. It also comes from knowing that I chose to risk losing the respect of the world in order to find myself.
CONTACT US
|
ADVERTISING INFO
|