Part 3.
Lenny may have seemed somewhat out of touch with the present state
of the literary world and he may not have read my work, but I thought I was
selling the shit out of it. All I needed was one person with the right
connections. Right? Perhaps this was the case, but Lenny was not getting a
penny from me. I was in a place of desperation, having just lost my job without
an idea of what would come next. While I wanted to shift all focus into
publishing a book, it wasn’t yet written and I didn’t even have twenty dollars
to spend on securing an agent. Lenny was not a great salesman, but I was sold.
In actuality, Lenny sounded like a crooked old man on the other end of the
phone from me. A lot can be translated through a telephone line and I felt like
I was talking to a swarmier version of the Jason Alexander character ‘George
Costanza’ from the great TV sitcom ‘Seinfeld’. If ‘George Costanza’ could
maintain his unappealingly gross persona on the program, maybe Lenny could as
well. While I could feel the sweat dripping from his forehead spilling over
through my cell phone, he was loving everything that came from my mouth. I
couldn’t fault him for the flattery. As I said before, flattery will get you
everywhere with me. While it was going somewhere, I couldn’t help but say no to
the money. I wanted his help, but I knew money was not meant to be exchanged
for a proper agent’s representation.
As quickly as I said no to his request of a “five hundred dollars
for your future”, he turned on a bit of the charm. This George Costanza-esque
character was desperate. I could feel the pathetic desperation through the
phone, but I had all my own dire circumstances. Perhaps we would be able to
help each other. And maybe I was the big client he had been waiting to appear.
He kept asking me if there was a dollar amount for a successful future. “Don’t
you see how little this five-hundred dollars will be in the great scheme of
things?! You won’t even remember that money when you’re on TV answering
questions from Jay Leno!” As enticing as this was, I couldn’t help but wonder
why he was asking me for this money if so much was going to happen for me.
I stood my ground, refusing to pay the five-hundred dollar fee.
The conversation did not stop there, however. Lenny continued to play his sales-speech
on me. While the flattery had done wonders, I wasn’t in the position for paying
any money. As he continued pressing me for funds, I kept explaining that I
would not be paying a dime. Eventually he wore me down and I opened up to him.
“I can’t afford that right now. I’m really sorry, but I have a load of past due
bills and this just isn’t something I can do today.” That’s where I fucked up.
I should have kept my ground about the money. There was no reason to explain or
go into detail as to why I wouldn’t be sending Lenny money. Just by saying that
I couldn’t afford the fee right now gave Lenny the room to further negotiate. I
should have stood firm on my stance, but this was my first time speaking to an
agent in any right, so I thought he would back off feeling some sort of
empathy. This would have been the case with a hotshot agent sitting in his
Beverly Hills digs, but as I said before, this was the George Costanza of
literary agents. Chances are he was sitting in a coffee shop asking for free
refills and a complimentary muffin while creating an office space among paying
customers.
Lenny then changed his sales speech. “Well, how much can you
afford right now? I’ll adjust our agreement to allow you to pay the bulk of the
money down the line.” How would I be paying down the line? Isn’t that when I’ll
be pulling in the big bucks? Lenny had no consistency to his behavior, although
looking back, he had one specific strain of thought: money. Once he began
asking me for money, the issues never faded. Whether he was cutting me a deal
or not, he was still going to obtain some level of financing from my side. “How
about you pay one-fifty up front, with the manuscript, in order to get it out
to the top publishing houses?” It never really occurred to me that given my
current state of lacking material, there was no way that I was going to have
something good enough for a publishing house. Any good agent would have told me
that from the get go, but we weren’t dealing with that, but rather with Lenny.
The conversation hit a weird plateau as I had no intentions of
sending him a dollar and he seemed convinced that I would be. “Let me send you
our contract and we can schedule a meeting for next week. How’s Monday for you?
At the Starbucks on Robertson and Olympic. See you then.” He didn’t even give
me a chance to respond. As I hung up the phone, I had a mixed wave of emotions.
Did I really have an agent? Was I going to figure out a way to send Lenny
money? Could I write an entire manuscript during the course of a weekend? I
didn’t have the answers to any of these questions, but I was reeling with
excitement. As any writer can tell you, rejection is a big part of this world.
Rarely does someone experience a lack of “no’s”, but I wanted to believe this
was going to be the case for me.
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