The Bialy Pimps (63 page)

I wanted to turn back the clock, to go back to college and the way it had been. But because Superman wasn’t around to scream in anguish and then fly rapidly around the Earth to inexplicably roll time backward, I settled for going back in the privacy of my own mind. So I started to write down the stories we’d shared back then, back there.
 

At first, the people I wrote into my new manuscript were as they had been in life, and the place was as it had been in concrete and glass. That soon changed, as “Bingham’s” became its own new thing and the characters began to blend and melt into wildly distorted, wildly exaggerated amalgams of the people I’d once known. The plot built itself, our for-real regular “Captain Dipshit” became a villain, Dicky Kulane materialized out of nowhere, and the characters began to think and talk for themselves. And what had begun as a kind of journal became the fully fictional first draft of what you’ve just finished reading.
 

But I still remembered who the people had been in real life, and I still remembered every small feature of the place that Bingham’s had been based on. There really was a chipped-out shape in the paint that resembled someone the place had once known. There really was a pothole in the middle of the office floor. There really was, once upon a time, a real-life Ghetto Phone.
 

I’d written this sprawling epic that was partially true, partially blue-sky fabrication — or inspiration, depending on how you see it. And because it was so important to me, I couldn’t edit it. I could nudge it a bit and clean up the wording and “punch it up” as the Hollywood types say, but I couldn’t address the biggest problems. I couldn’t remove the minor characters so that the reader would remember the main ones. I couldn’t remove my recounting of High Street’s many colorful characters that weren’t relevant, but that meant something to me. I couldn’t change the autobiographical truths of some real-life moments so that they made sense in the context of a fictional tale.
 

In other words, I couldn’t commit to the harsh rewrite it would take to turn something I cared very much about into something that others might care about — and remain interested enough in to read all the way through. The first, second, and third drafts of this book were filled with my precious friends and memories. It was filled with my “darlings,” and I couldn’t bring myself to kill any of them.
   

Flash forward a decade or so.

In November of 2011, a friend of mine named Adrian Varnam insisted that I read Steven Pressfield’s book
The War of Art
. He insisted, in fact, that he pay for a copy and have it shipped to me. I tried to protest, saying that I could pay for my own books, but he very firmly said, “I’m
sending
you this book,” and so I let it be. The book arrived, and I read it in a day. And after a week or two of letting Pressfield’s words rattle around in my brain, I realized something troubling.

I realized that
The Bialy Pimps
was still unfinished, no matter how much I told myself it was complete. I’d given birth to a major creative work, but I’d let Resistance stop me.
 

I went to my closet and pulled out the manuscript box containing the 180,000-word third draft of my ancient novel (on the box: “IT’S VERY GOOD! TRUST IT! DON’T MESS WITH IT!” and the codicil I’d neglected to add “… UNTIL YOU’RE READY TO KILL SOME UNNECESSARY DARLINGS!”), and began reading.
 

On the first read, I figured my task would consist mainly of excising the irrelevant parts. This was encouraging, because it meant I could do it relatively quickly. I’d lop out the sections that went nowhere and remove the huge, windy, introspective passages that were all about me telling myself that life was going to work out if I had faith. I’d put myself in the shoes of an objective reader and simply ask myself what bored me. And after a distance of twelve years — time during which I’d gotten and remained very happily married, had two delightful kids, quit the terrible job and created an online business that I enjoyed every minute of, gained some internet fame, and made many amazing new friends — I was every bit objective enough to do that.
 

But the job was far, far harder than I’d thought. My emotion at the time had masked major problems with the manuscript. Dicky Kulane, who was the only major character that hadn’t been inspired at all by a real person, read like a cardboard cutout. Dicky’s plotting and motivations were totally unbelievable. I cut-jumped around the novel as it suited me as a writer, leaving the reader hanging and confused. A lot of it was still very funny and very good to my older and hopefully wiser eye, but it needed a lot of work.
 

But I was on fire like I’ve seldom been. I rediscovered that place, now mostly fictional. I re-met those people, now personae in their own, imaginary right. From this, I found the energy from a top-to-bottom rewrite of easily two-thirds of the book, and did it on top of a full-load of “real, for-money business” I had on my plate. I got up early. I stayed up lated. I squeezed in over six hours a day on the rewrite in addition to my work and family commitments, and in around seven weeks, the final draft was complete.
 

Well, almost. Until I published the thing, it would still be incomplete in the way that counted. So I told myself that no matter what happened with this novel, it deserved to at least see the light of day. It deserved, in Seth Godin’s terms, to be “shipped,” regardless of what would happen next. And I pushed through until that happened.

I hope you enjoyed this book, but if you didn’t, I won’t be offended because I didn’t write it for you. I wrote it the first time for me, and the second time for the book itself.
 

No matter what happens next, I’m proud of this book, and what it’s grown up to be. I’m pleased it had the courage to be born, and then to be reborn. I’m glad it was able to tell its story, and to become what it was meant to become.
 

2/14/12