For You, The Stars
Chapter Eleven: Installment 2
“How’d it go?” said Cecilia, on the phone, that night.
“OK, I guess,” I said. “The people were nice. The commute was kind of sucky. I think it took about an hour and fifteen minutes. Good thing I brought a book.” (I was on a world history jag and was currently reading a book about the breakdown of the Ottoman empire and the formation of the modern middle east at the end of World War I.)
“Did you get any free books?” she said.
“Actually, yeah. They gave me a handful off the guy’s shelf, so I’d understand what I might be getting into.”
“Maybe we can try out some of the stuff in there.”
“They’re not sex manuals,” I said. “They’re stories.”
“I know,” she said. “I meant maybe I can be, like, the headmistress and you can be the naughty schoolboy.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Or you can be Bo Peep and I can be a lamb.”
“You are so weird.”
The interview had actually gone very well, although the dynamic between Judith and Bryan was a little odd. Later on I would figure out that these were Berkeley people. They weren’t like other people, even in the Bay Area. San Francisco people have their own idiosyncrasies and preoccupations but Berkeley people are different. It’s not the old Mario Sauvio Free Speech movement stereotype, either, or the naked parade How Berkeley Can You Be parade idea, for that matter. It’s definitely not the quasi-socialist People’s Republic of Berkeley concept resurrected in the Wall Street Journal every time there’s a slow news day or even the “officially make pot busts the Berkeley police department’s lowest priority” thing. It’s more of a kind of insular climate of confidence and even privilege. Berkeley had become to a large extent a well-to-do small city full of homeowners who fought the university over real estate and the tax base even while the old People’s Park seizures were finally being settled.
These people were yuppies but in their minds they were ultra-progressive. At one point Judith joked that her daughter’s first word was “croissant” and she said it with a French accent, cwa-soh, not crossont like a normal American would say.
But, like I said, they were nice. Bryan noticed that I had been a philosophy major at Princeton and even asked me about my thesis. I later learned he had studied philosophy himself as a grad student at UC. He actually had been in the Free Speech movement. I guess that in a way wasn’t too many hops away from the dirty book business, although I couldn’t help wondering how he had come to it.
He asked me about wanting to work in publishing and we discussed the dearth of options for that in the Bay Area. I wasn’t really that keen on working in book publishing, per se, let along “erotic” novels. If I had a choice I’d have worked for a magazine or newspaper, but on arriving out west I’d sent my resume out to all the local papers and the few magazines, like Mother Jones that published in San Francisco and heard almost nothing back aside from a few dismal form letters. I tried working the alumni networks of my boarding school and college but that likewise yielded nothing aside from a few offers of paralegal work.
I even went to a career counselor. “If you want to work in publishing” he said. “You should move to New York. Have you considered that?”
“I just came from there,” I said. “I’m looking for something different.”
“Well, you came to the wrong place for publishing,” he said, “but I’ll see what I can do.”
Which turned out to be nothing.
The Climex people said they would call me, and I went back to my job the next day not sure what I really wanted. They were fast about it. I don’t think they even checked my references. Two days after my interview I came home to a message on my machine from Bryan. He said the assistant editor job had been filled already but that they had another opening, an editorial assistant, that they’d like to offer me and would I give them a call on Monday?
Editorial assistant sounded even lower than assistant editor. Was it worth it to switch from studio assistant to editorial assistant. I guess I was getting a lot of office experience as I euphemistically called it. Maybe I could pursue a professional in assistant-ing, maybe climb the ladder to the pinnacle of executive assistant, even - if I dared to dream - assistant to the CEO of some horrible company.
On Monday I called Bryan back. He said they could send me an offer letter but he wanted to warn me first that the pay for this job was quite low. “This is publishing,” he said with a chuckle in his voice. “Remember that.”
How low? Try $7.00 an hour! $2.50 less an hour, $20 less a day, $5000 less a year. But for the chance to break into the glamorous world of publishing, well worth it! I couldn’t even fool myself about that. Plus, I wasn’t looking forward to telling my parents about my new job if I did switch.
I asked if I could take some time to think about it and he said yes but warned me that there had been other applicants for the job and asked for an answer within a week. Seven dollars an hour! It was a shocking pittance. That Ivy League education was really paying off.
I talked it over with Dave and Chad and Hopper and Savage and they reminded me that I wasn’t exactly making bank in my current job, which was even more a dead end unless I was going to miraculously grow a degree in architecture. “But the commute,” I said. “It’s insane.”
“That’s what they invented walkmans for,” said Savage.
“Walkmen,” I said. Seth Savage resumed beating me at chess, his current obsession.
In the end the thing that clinched it for me was the awful climate at the downtown office and an impish sense that leaving them for a cut in pay was a humiliating slap in the face. They couldn’t entice me to stay with an offer of more money knowing I was leaving them for less. Plus, as pathetic as the new job sounded, it was at least marginally close to being a job in the creative world and that had to count for something.
I called Bryan back on Wednesday, from my office cubicle, to tell him that I wanted to take the job but that the pay was just too low. Was there anything he could do about it? He said he’d see.
In the end he offered me $7.50 and I took it. As predicted, the architects were flabbergasted, or at least my studio boss was. They asked if there was some way they could make my job more interesting. I told them the new job was in publishing and that was closer to my longer-term career goals. They suggested I could work in marketing, write press releases. I told them they didn’t get it. They exit interview was awkward.
I managed to finagle a week or two off before starting my new job in Emeryville. I spent it lying on the back deck in Marin.
The new job wasn’t bad. The people were pretty hip. At least they were readers. I settled in pretty quickly. I had to share a computer with the other junior editors in a row of cubicles. I was kind of everyone’s assistant. I did odd jobs. Some copying, a little proofreading. Mostly paperwork, filing stuff, getting forms ready for R.R. Bowker to assign ISBN’s to books and the Library of Congress for those details that show up inside the second page of a book that I had never really looked closely at before - card catalogue stuff. I was a little surprised that the Library of Congress was kept so well informed of the details of each stroke book that came off the presses.
It’s not like anyone at Climex had pretensions about these books, although I did a little research into the history of the company and found out that they had published some fairly daring stuff in the ’50s, in the era of Lolita and Olympia. One rumor was that the other of several of the earliest racy book in the back catalog, Weldon Dowd, was really Norman Mailer, although I read one of them and found it hard to credit.
Still, it ran like any other business. There as plenty of filing to do, correspondence with authors, getting together corrections for second printings, running out to the burrito wagon around the 10:15 break. It was often pretty boring, and I’d sometimes stick one of the books in my pants pocket and walk stiff-legged into the men’s room to read for a while and think about having a wank, as the British might say. As often as not the hygienic surroundings or the entry of some other man into the bathroom, whistling and farting, would destroy the mood for me and I’d change my mind. Usually the sports section of the Chronicle was on the floor of the bathroom already or maybe even the comics, and I’d just sit there and read until claustrophobia sent me back to my desk.
Then they sent me to a copyediting class, to get me ready to be a real editor. They paid for me to take a class at the UC Extension. I dropped my painting class because there were only so many night of the week I was willing to head over to Berkeley after work to better myself. Now at least I could zip over after work, grab a bite somewhere on Bancroft, take my class, and then take the Berkeley BART back to downtown SF where I could switch to the N-Judah and be home before 10.
The class was kind of interesting. Mostly I learned proofreader’s marks. I didn’t know all the rules of copyediting but I could usually tell when a sentence was wrong and needed fixing. I memorized the specific reasons and put a little structure around my intuitions. I bought Webster’s Third and the Chicago Manual of Style. They gave us a copyediting test every other class and I went from pretty good to nearly perfect. Apparently a lot of “real” publishing jobs used these kinds of tests to screen people, so that was a bonus.
Also, there was a girl in the class I started chatting with before and after, named Giselle. She reminded me for some reason of Sigourney Weaver, although not as tall. Something around her jawline I guess. She spoke with a vaguely posh New England sounding accent although she was actually from California, born and raised. She was the editor of a very small publishing house that as far as I could tell was created by her father’s friend, a rich lawyer who was bored with his winery and looking for a new outlet. He had carved out a space for her in his law office on Montgomery and had given her a mandate to find some authors and publish them. I was envious. Why didn’t I have a patron like that? He had also sent her to this class to learn the tools of the trade.
I found myself thinking of Giselle when I was with Cecilia.