Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (25 page)

At first, he told me he wouldn’t be the right editor, but that he thought someone at SMP would be.

I was crushed, but then something happened that convinced me my book would be published: A visitation.

John and I had continued our club-going in NYC as we had in Chicago, even though things were clearly different. In Chicago, it was fashionable to dress up to go to bars, wearing vintage jackets and sporting sharp, shellacked hairdos, giant crosses (John X-Actoed some homemade ones for every occasion, so you could show up wearing anyone from Debbie Harry to Tony Ward on your chest), and shiny black dress shoes. All we did was dance our asses off—trying to be seen as both the best, and the most unconcerned about being the best, dancer was what it was all about.

In NYC, the clubs were not kidding around. At Limelight, there was a large backroom with guys giving head to each other—right out in the open—as well as picking each other’s pockets. Styles had shifted dramatically, with grunge all the rage. John and I went shopping at Urban Outfitters and showed up at Club USA in our plaid finery, sporting accidentally matching strands of plastic beads.

One little bitch walked past us and sneered, “What’d you do?
Call
each other?”

We were so dejected we didn’t dare go on the slide.

At the places where dancing ruled, it seemed like everyone was on drugs and eating candy or bananas, not because they tasted good but because they helped the drugs work. I didn’t fit in and was rapidly withdrawing from my cherished routine of going out dancing.

Luckily, I didn’t give it up before John and I ran into our idol.

On June 25, 1993, around 3 a.m., we were walking home from some far-west club when we came upon the Sound Factory. John and I always had a habit of trying to crack each other up by looking at the people coming toward us and murmuring under our breath, “Oh, look, there’s Jackée Harry…there’s Sylvester Stallone…there’s Tiffany.” And you’d look and the person would have like one thing in common with the name-checked star, and the rest would be a disaster. It’s a wonder no one ever overheard us and punched us, and it’s debatable as to whether someone should have. (What’s the statute of limitations on smart-ass?)

This evening, John looked ahead and then said to me, “There’s Madonna.”

I expected it to be someone who more closely resembled the Egg Lady from those John Waters movies. I looked up and instead saw…Madonna.
The
Madonna. She was in short bib overalls with black straps underneath running across her back. It was the brief era of her strawberry pigtails, post-
Sex
and just a few months after she’d released her redheaded bastard of a “Fever” music video. In my journal, I described her as looking so cute in person, and like a perfect quote little monster unquote. (Lady Gaga obviously somehow read my journal, stole the phrase, then put it back in my storage unit.)

Madonna was with a gay black guy, had no security and was not attracting the slightest bit of notice from the (okay, they were probably wasted) club kids.

As we passed, Madonna turned toward the club and seethed, “Man, you could catch a
disease
in that place.” Or was it, “A few Zs”?

The only disease I had was fandom—which is chronic and for which the only cure is disillusionment. For me, brushing past Madonna felt like a sign that I’d sell my book, even if I didn’t and don’t believe in signs. Or books.

Shortly thereafter, Tom Dunne called me into his office. He couldn’t get out of his head the belief that a Madonna book would make money. Everyone else said she was over, but he either had his eye on the long game or was hopelessly out of the loop, because he bit. He wrote something on his stationery and slid it across his desk.

“This is my offer,” he said, grinning at my telegraphed anticipation.

Ten grand!
It had taken Jane a year to rack up dozens of polite rejections from other publishers, but I’d sold my own book on my very first try.

Then SMP sold a Japanese edition of the book, which helped me earn back my advance, and I was beginning to feel like a big-time author. I bought a TV and a VCR. I even got an air conditioner. Without wanting to sound like Michele Duvalier, I now think one can not
live
in NYC in the summer without air conditioning.

Writing that book about Madonna changed my life. It earned me a little money, it made me a published author, which helped pave the way for what was next—my first novel. It also caught the attention of Madonna’s camp.

During the publication process, I had contacted Madonna’s legendary publicist, Liz Rosenberg, sending her one of my patented long-winded suck-up letters and asking if there were any chance they might like to make the book official and have approval over its contents. Silence. But once it was out and she got a look at it, Liz got what I was trying to do (and overlooked entries like “slump”), calling me at my new and very temporary job at Reuters, where I was a news assistant.

I almost passed out when she introduced herself on the phone. She was still flipping through the book as she spoke.

“I love this!” she exclaimed. We had a warm conversation, with me reminding her of the one time we’d met, outside Madonna’s Illinois
Blond Ambition
venue, where I’d timidly asked for her autograph and the famously private, spotlight-avoiding lady had responded, “Mine? No.” (Probably a good idea not to hand a Madonna fan your signature when you’re the publicist—imagine how many would try to present it at after-parties or at the front door to Madonna’s building like some sort of pass key.)

Liz was so enamored of the book she and Christine Wolff in her office at Warner Bros. Records suggested I send them a copy for Madonna to sign to me along with one I had signed to her. I fully expect the copy I signed to her to pop up in a used bookstore somewhere, so just in case you need some provenance, I wrote something like, “From one Michigan girl to another.”

Then I waited for the Madonna autograph—my first—to come to me. Except it didn’t. And I was so giddy that Liz loved my book that I didn’t dare inquire. Instead, I went on with my life, such as it was, Madonna autograph-less.

Nearly two years later, when I’d given up the ghost on it, a package popped up in my P.O Box with a note from Liz’s assistant, Johanna, apologizing—they’d had Madonna sign it right away then had misplaced it in Liz’s cluttered pop museum of an office.

“To Matthew, Love Madonna,” it reads…kind of. Madonna isn’t an enthusiastic signer, and often makes a mess of it. It could have said, “Fuck you, fatso,” and I would still cherish it. It’s a really treasured possession because it’s something most fanboys never get, which is proof that the object of their adulation knows they exist.

Or at least she knew for a moment.

A moment is about as long as I lasted at Reuters, my job after SMP. What a disaster. I had two bosses, answered to countless grizzled newsroom guys, and was surrounded by more than six characters in search of an author, presumably David Mamet. My job was to take dictation from reporters in the field, then make it accessible to one of the editors, who would transform it into a story and make it live online. The connections were never sound and the human cigarettes around me were so jaded and uncaring I can only laugh when right-wingers mock the media as being so liberal.

Granted, if I had to, I’d bet that most of the editors voted for Democrats. But they were also hard-nosed New Yawkers who were untouched by newfangled political correctness—and unblemished by human decency, in some cases. When Greg Louganis announced he was HIV-positive in 1995, catcalls of “Loug-ANUS” went up in the newsroom, even though I was openly gay as was at least one of the editors.

I was super self-conscious there, and became paranoid that I’d accidentally put something onto the wire that I wasn’t supposed to, which I did—raw notes from an interview with the recently sprung Mike Tyson, who was finally out of prison after his rape conviction. Much hooting and hollering commenced. I was made to feel like a complete douchebag, even though most of the male reporters tended to think Mike Tyson was a good guy who’d been railroaded.

I had tried to avoid the Reuters job. It had come down to an offer from Reuters vs. an offer from a woman for whom I just could not bring myself to work.

Connie Clausen was an older lady who’d been a TV and Broadway actress, baby food spokesmodel, and circus acrobat, and who now ran a boutique agency out of a small office. I arrived 10 minutes late in nice jeans and a sweater and sat with her (“Sit down,” she commanded, when I already had.) while she quizzed me on my publishing experience, which of course already included several years at Multimedia in Chicago and two years at SMP.

Connie was only about 70 but 70 felt like 100 in the way it will to someone who is closer to 20. She was also a daunting figure due to her history in book publishing, first as an executive at Macmillan, where she’d worked on things like
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
. One thing I didn’t learn about her until later is that she was the American agent for Quentin Crisp, the legendarily lavender-haired, gender-bucking writer. Just a few years later, when Connie was about to die at age 74, she would be frantically doing damage control when Crisp said he’d counsel a mother expecting a gay baby to seek an abortion. Glad I wasn’t second-in-command on
that
sinking ship.

The real problem is that she was a bossy, white-haired lady who was hard of hearing, and she had just been released from the hospital, and for me, it felt like she would have been a repeat of my experience with Jane, except without Jane’s warmth and mentoring and rebellious sense of humor, and with the added pressure of doubling as her nursemaid. The domineering attitude Connie displayed toward her put-upon assistant would have earned good money in disreputable clubs patronized by businessmen in search of a spanky, but seemed to me a harbinger of bad things to come. I didn’t want a lateral move, nor did I fancy risking a backward slide, so I lost interest in the job mid-interview.

Connie called me up very soon after to offer me the position, but I’d just gotten the call from Reuters, so I told her, in a way designed to make her feel better about being rejected (why did I care?), “It’s a decision I may regret, but I have to turn down your kind offer because I’ve accepted a position at Reuters.”

“I think you’re right,” Connie said, tricking me into thinking she was being gracious at first. Then she set me straight. “I think you
will
regret this decision very much. I knew I shouldn’t have hired you—you were late and you were wearing jeans—but oh, well, good luck.” (Phone slams down.)

If only she’d known my next move was into the world of porn.

Boy Culture
had started life as a bratty short story designed to shock my conservative college, had been used to get me into Richard Stern’s prestigious (flashback to the Spelling Bee where I lost on that word) short-story course, had gotten rejiggered into a novella I used as my thesis to graduate (how many other U of C grad theses made mention of rimming?), and by the time I was an editorial assistant at St. Martin’s Press, was a full-fledged novel. I was sick to death of writing it, but was ecstatic when I finished it. It felt like a cohesive statement, it felt honest, and it felt cheeky and in-your-face, like the many books that had no doubt inspired me, chief among them Gore Vidal’s
Myra Breckinridge
and Larry Kramer’s
Faggots.

Because
Encyclopedia Madonnica
was in the process of being published, it was only natural that I submit something else. I tried with an ill-conceived proposal about infomercials (A book about infomercials? How 1994 can you get?) and then considered doing a book on gay culture before finally hitting on something saleable with
Totally Awesome ‘80s
, a compendium of anything and everything on the decade that had shaped my youth…and a decade that had barely ended. I have to have been the first person to pitch a book on the ‘80s, and I’m convinced I coined the term
Totally Awesome ‘80s
, too, though LexisNexis might disagree.

But before I plunged into that, I had this gay novel waiting to be seen, and the gay literary scene was hot and happenin’. Not only that, but my publisher, SMP, was known for publishing gay lit. I felt like I was home free.

My former boss and current agent Jane wasn’t keen on selling a gay novel, not because she was a Republican, but because she knew it would never sell for much money, if at all. Also, it was pretty explicit, sexually; I seem to remember her mentioning her husband would pass out if he ever happened to read it.