Starf*cker: a Meme-oir by Matthew Rettenmund

Author:Matthew Rettenmund [Rettenmund, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Lethe Press
Published: 2015-10-18T07:00:00+00:00

Working at St. Martin’s Press was a learning experience as well as boring. You can learn a lot from what bores you. For one thing, it really helps you figure out what doesn’t.

When I wasn’t doing my day-to-day job, all of the editorial assistants would be paid a little extra moolah to dig through the “slush pile” in hope of discovering the next Silence of the Lambs or Barbara Taylor Bradford. The slush pile was a room filled with random queries from authors that the company for some odd reason did not discard upon receipt. They’d load us up on cheese pizza and generic soda and leave us there after hours, but we all knew how unlikely it was that anything worthwhile would come to the company unsolicited, so we pretty much just glanced at titles and at how rickety it appeared the typewriters were that had been used to address the envelopes. Everyone’s uncle had a WWII memoir, every young girl had a guide for finding the perfect man, and every housewife had a bloated novel of love and lust, all crying out for a wider audience and for the kind of big-bucks advances that were actually paid in the days before vampires and SM were the only things that sold.

We did have access to some pretty funny stuff, like Charlie Sheen’s misanthropic poetry proposal for A Peace of My Mind, complete with illustration showing a hand holding a chunk of brain matter (we were 20 years early on the story of his insanity). Then there was the query that threatened to make the world see bestiality in a whole new light. Its cover letter read:

“Thank you in advance for rejecting [this] manuscript…Please accept my apologies in advance for submitting material apt to evoke litigation. [She] was a small black cat, oh so tiny and oh so black. We had a love affair some years back. Her grave is under my bedroom window, beneath the azalea ‘Dark Spring,’ a plant of unusual beauty and with an exotic scent. The bottom of her grave marker has rotted away and so I have placed what remains in my bedroom. I met [her] at Angel Field, a small, dilapidated track behind [a stadium]…That the manuscript join [her] in her now unmarked grave seems fitting. Please accept my apologies for this intrusion.”

Made me wonder if the author—an esteemed doctor—used to regale his bar buddies with stories of all the pussy he used to score.

My sci fi boss was kind of ornery—I think we liked each other a lot more after I eventually quit, because I was so disinterested in his specialty (he was not just a science fiction buff, he was a very respected connoisseur in the field) and he was so disinterested in all of mine. I’d become friendly with a complete weirdo from New Jersey who was a popstar groupie and who told me he was sucking off, a temporary member of a major ‘80s New Romantic band. I was naïve,

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