Uneducated by Christopher Zara

Author:Christopher Zara [ZARA, CHRISTOPHER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2023-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

They Call Me Mr. Gates

WHEN HE WAS NOT AT his weekend house in Connecticut, Mr. Chieftain lived in a cramped one-bedroom apartment on the far East Side. It technically overlooked York Avenue, although you could barely see out the window because of all the construction netting. He had been living there since his acting days in the nineties, and he often half joked that he would have been banished to an even smaller apartment in Queens or New Jersey if it weren’t for the miracle of rent stabilization. He was proud of the carpeting, though. Monday through Friday, when I showed up at ten in the morning, he would make me take my shoes off at the front door and leave them in the hall. He’d offer me a beverage and we would adjourn to his tiny living room, where we would work at two Mac computers at opposite ends of the space.

By the beginning of 2012, this was all that was left of Show Business Weekly: two men in their socks, working from a third-floor walkup on the far East Side. We were both battling waves of depression at that point, both going through the motions, cobbling together bits and pieces from the newspaper’s archives to put out special issues in the hope that a few drama schools would keep advertising. Almost every name on the masthead was either fake or belonged to someone who no longer worked there. When I was laying it out, I always saved room for Tim House, our trusty “account executive,” the person whose ad in the Village Voice I’d thought I was answering six years earlier.

With the help of a very tenacious literary agent, I finally did get that book deal. A small specialty publisher, an imprint of F+W Media, best known for Writer’s Digest magazine and the Everything book series, agreed to buy the proposal. It wasn’t HarperCollins but I was thrilled to have it. The advance they offered me was small, so small that it would not float me for more than a few weeks. If writing a book was an escape hatch, it wasn’t a very promising one. Also, I didn’t know how to tell Mr. Chieftain. Leave of absence was not in his vocabulary, and the newspaper had been in survival mode for so long that I did not think he would accept anything less than a perpetual state of red alert. Any break in my attention, even a temporary hiatus to focus on an outside project, would be perceived as an act of betrayal.

So petrified was I of broaching the subject that I kept the book deal to myself for several weeks. When the pressure became too much, I finally blurted “I’m leaving!” into the phone receiver as he was reaming me out for the millionth time over some administrative task that hadn’t gotten done. That was it. I’d said it. There was no going back.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Mr. Chieftain said after a pause.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.