The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Twenty-One: Brief Literary Acclaim

Now that I was living in the other Chris Sartinsky’s room and avoiding the other Chris Sartinsky’s girl (not my type; she was one of those people who describe themselves as “random” and are inevitably the most predictable bores you’ll ever meet), I figured I’d test how far I could take this thing. I went around the building and met everyone. It turned out that the old Chris Sartinsky had made a lot of friends there, and so naturally, they became my friends when they learned the other was gone. And they were good friends, too. At first I was “Two,” because I was the second Chris Sartinsky, but after a while of only seeing me I just became Chris, and then the first Chris became the “other” Chris and I was somehow the original, or at least the preeminent. This made me very happy, because I really despised that other Chris Sartinsky, and I didn’t want anybody to think about him anymore.

It’s weird, though, the way I hated him. The kid hadn’t done anything to deserve it. But for whatever reason, I just wanted to blot him out, make it so he had never existed, expunge his name from the Book of Life or whatever that is. I really hated him that much, I could only be happy if I utterly destroyed him.

Anyway, all of us on that floor shared a bathroom, of course. We had to clean it ourselves, which usually entailed a few cans of Oust and any and every bath product that promised to do all the hard work for us. We bought an automatic shower cleaner, which sprayed whatever soap you put in it at pre-set intervals, and the idea was to get it to go off when someone else was in the shower and blast them with scrubbing bubbles and bleach. I got it in the eyes once. Not much fun.

Anyway, one day I was brushing my teeth and I noticed this book on the floor with a gaudy cover that read “UNCLE JOHN’S ALL-PURPOSE EXTRA STRENGTH BATHROOM READER.” It was designed to be read while one was on the toilet, I gathered. It all seemed very coarse, and I felt like there were germs crawling all over me just from touching the pages.

(Later, I would ask my friends who put it in there, and they would all deny knowledge of whose book it was. This led me to believe that it was put there by someone on another floor or maybe one of our other friends who didn’t live in the same building with us or maybe God.)

So like I said, I was disgusted by it at first, but then I started flipping through it, and I found myself reading. It was just a compilation of short essays with little nuggets of trivia scattered throughout, but it was captivating. The content was better than it had any right to be and it was just so perfectly paced, I thought. I was mesmerized. With some trepidation (still with the germs, and all), I brought the book into my room and read the whole thing cover to cover that night. Which may have defeated the purpose, but I didn’t really care.

When I finished, I realized that I hadn’t enjoyed it as much as I felt I should have. The essays were good and the trivia was all right, but it wasn’t the kind of thing a person would normally read in one sitting. I wasn’t really that interested in what was written, but the form of it was just beautiful. It was I had walked into the bathroom and discovered a Platonic Ideal just lying there on the tile. Holding it in my hands, it was like I was handling the Holy Grail. I realized it wasn’t the worthiest endeavor in human history. But how could this Uncle John set out to do something and then do it so exactly right? The next day I went to the book store to see if there were more of these things. Turns out there were about fifteen and I bought them all and tore through them before the weekend.

As I read them, and then started to really truly study them, I started to become a little disenchanted. By the third or fourth time through any one particular book, I started to notice that the timing felt a little wrong, and by the fourth or fifth time, it felt downright backwards. And as I got a better idea of the things that these books did contain, I noticed certain unfortunately recurring themes that bordered on obsession (toilet paper, assless chaps, trivia about battleships) and other things that I wished they put in that were nowhere to be found. And that’s when I started to get the crazy idea that I could do better.

The first time I had that thought, it felt like sacrilege. How could I possibly put myself on the same level as Uncle John? He had created an empire of books for toilets and (for the most part) about toilets on the strength of a brilliant idea and near-flawless execution. But the thought wouldn't go away, and I began to accept that it never would until I succeeded or failed.

I withdrew from most of my classes (by this time we were a few weeks into the second semester) and got to work. I spent hours every day doing research in the library, writing draft after draft of bathroom material. I was aware of Uncle John’s influence hovering over me throughout the process, but I also felt it was important to forge my own path. If anyone browsing the bathroom book section was going to bypass Uncle John—the unquestioned giant of the field— for me, I had to give them something different. So I moved away from some of Uncle John’s tics. I barely wrote about bathrooms at all. I tried to keep my volume brainier, but still accessible for an entire family, from the working dad to the third grade kid. The humor was light and observational, for the most part, the trivia enlightening, the opinions mostly uncontroversial. I finished the thing in three weeks. I planned on spending the next month or two revising it, but after going through it three times or so I realized I was barely changing anything. It was already perfect.

But I did have one problem: the structure. The first thing I tried was organizing it into themed sections. This is what Uncle John often did, but with my own looser material in particular, I found this technique to be either aimless or constraining depending on the way the reader approached the book (aimless if he skipped around, picking and choosing, and constraining if he went from cover to cover, most likely getting sick of a subject or style long before he reached the end of the section). The next thing I did was throw the pages around the room and rearrange them, hoping for a surrealistic flash of inspiration in the flip of my arm, I guess, but any sense of pacing was lost. I realized that the only way to arrange it perfectly was through painstaking trial and error.

Of course, if I had to wait for nature to take its course every time I wanted to work on the book, I never would have finished it. So I began spending almost all day in the bathroom at timed intervals simulating the work of the human digestive system. Whenever my friends wanted to use the bathroom they had to knock on the door and ask me, and I would give it up on the condition that 1) they read the book while they were in there and give me notes on their overall experience, and 2) if they were showering, they had made every honest effort to try to shower on another floor first. Quickly I began to realize that human rhythms did not work within the confines of essays and quick one-liners in any way I could understand, so I began rewriting the entire thing into more uniform chunks from one to three paragraphs, organized with a mind to order, mood and tone. It was a bit like coming up with a track list for an album: each piece had to flow into the next—and yet, it was more difficult, because the patterns of the reader picking up the book whenever he was in the bathroom and leaving it behind afterwards made for a much more unpredictable task than working under the assumption that someone will listen to an album from start to finish.

I started in January and I was finished by April. It was unquestionably a masterpiece.

The next step was finding a publisher. I titled my manuscript "Uncle Chris’s Book for When You Have to Take a Shit" and sent it to Houghton Mifflin, a publishing house based in Boston.

A couple weeks after I sent it out, they sent me an unequivocal letter of rejection. Though I “showed promise” (at the time I took it to heart; now I wonder if they say that to everyone), they said the book was “disorganized,” that they found it “hard to follow, and it was difficult to find an incentive to try” (a mess of a sentence if you ask me, especially for the people meant to be judging my work). They certainly closed the door on me with that letter, and I had no reason to think any follow-up notes I might send wouldn’t be dropped in the first available trash can, but I tried anyway. I wrote “Take it into the bathroom” on an index card (an incredibly ballsy or stupid move on my part; I didn’t write the title anywhere, assuming they would connect the name on the envelope with the manuscript) and mailed it back to them immediately. About a month later, they said that they were rushing my book into publication and offered me a $100,000 advance, which seemed a little low to the guy about the change the face of bathroom reading forever, but I reluctantly accepted.

They weren’t kidding when they said they were rushing it into publication. I went in for a meeting with Houghton Mifflin executives on May 15th and they already had a sample copy for me to look over. I was pleased to see that they had left the text untouched. People believed in my vision. They gave me a kind of unofficial tour of the office, showing me one office after another belonging to people who had read and loved the book. One gushed that I had somehow managed to “perfectly capture the mood and cadence of the bathroom;” another said I was "the Chekhov of toilet literature;" a third called me “a wit unmatched since Jonathon Swift.” I thought I already knew these things, and I gave them all my shit-eatingest smile. “It is truly a privilege to have you on board with us,” one of them said, shaking my hand, and I replied, “Yes, yes it must be.”

They wanted me to discuss some details of the contract and my royalties with an accountant, but he was out of the office, so they apologized and left me in a small lobby outside his office. My guide at this point was the person who had read my manuscript first (and couldn’t stop apologizing for how he had missed the point, and I didn’t let him forget it), and there was an intern, a girl about my age, sitting behind a desk. She smiled and told me that this accountant couldn’t stop talking about how much money I was going to make everyone—myself in particular. I rolled my eyes, disgusted that my art was being talked about in such an obscenely capitalistic matter. The intern wilted a little and my guide tried to divert my attention from her to the table, where Houghton Mifflin’s big summer lineup was laid out for people to browse through. “There’s yours!” he said. And sure enough, there was "Uncle Chris’s Book for When You Have to Take a Shit," right out there, on a glass table, in a publishing house’s lobby. I was furious.

“What the fuck is this,” I said, just loud enough so that I could barely be heard.

“What’s that?” my guide asked, about to cry, I could tell, because he could see that he had done something horribly wrong to the most valuable writer who had walked through their door in years.

Screaming now. “I said, what the fuck is THIS?” I picked up the book and shoved it right into the guy’s face, right up to his nose, and I used it to push him until he backed into the wall.

“Aah!” he cried. “I’m sorry!” Even though he had no idea what he was apologizing for. Such was the power I held over these people, for some reason.

“This book does not belong in your fucking waiting room!” I turned around and spit. It landed somewhere in the vicinity of a green leather couch. “Do you know what this is?” I grabbed him by the tie and yanked him down the hallway. The intern jumped out of her seat and followed us, without doing anything to stop me. I guess she just thought that if this guy died, there should be someone there to witness it, for posterity’s sake.

I pulled him to the bathroom and kicked the door. It swung open, nearly jumping off its hinges. “This is where my work belongs!” at the top of my lungs, so everyone in the office could hear me. I spun it into the bathroom like a Frisbee. The hard corner hit the toilet, leaving a thick black crack in the tank. The book fell in the bowl, which was unintentional on my part, but the point was made. I yanked on the guy’s tie and he went tumbling onto the bathroom floor, apologizing even as he rolled around on the grimy tile.

No one moved or made a sound in that whole office. I briefly considered that I had gone too far. But I realized that, regardless, there was nothing else here for me to do, so I just walked out, and didn’t return any of their calls for a while.

They panicked, of course, because "Uncle Chris’s Book for When You Have to Take a Shit" was the centerpiece of their summer slate, and they needed me to go on the book tour, the talk show circuit and so on. They left me terrified voice mails several times a day, every day, asking me to come into the office so they could apologize and make nice, checking in to make sure I was still on board, telling me they desperately wanted to bring this book to the forefront of the literary world. They needed me, and I enjoyed making them say as much.

In the meantime, they had everything they needed to go ahead and publish the book, so that's what they did. All they could do was publicize it and hope that it wouldn't make me want to kill them any more. They knew that it was a book that had the potential to change everything, but they also knew that it would be difficult to convince other people that this was the case; it was an unpleasant reading experience if it was taken anywhere other than the bathroom. So they begged reviewers to take their time with the book, leaving it in the bathroom for the optimal reading experience. Reviewers who didn't follow instructions mostly ignored and occasionally panned the book (because I had earned the tag “hot new writer” without publishing a thing, I was an easy target). But the ones who did as they were told raved, and the critical consensus was that it was brilliant, and any reviewer who said otherwise was exposed as a lazy hack whose opinion was not to be trusted. I was pleased with the way Houghton Mifflin handled it, so I called them one day out of the blue and informed them that I would be attending their launch party on the first of June. The sigh of relief that went through their office was so great I could hear it from my little place on Bay State. Depending on me, that was their mistake.

The party was in a convention hall on the third floor of a big hotel. The ceilings were low, though, I remember that. There was a big cardboard cutout of the book’s cover when you went in, but the only place where you could find any actual copies was in one corner of the room, where there was a big shelf of them in a big replica bathroom with a giant toilet and sink. The same old guy was showing me around and he was very proud about the replica bathroom, but also clearly scared to see how I would react. I game him a smug little grin and shrugged like I thought he was an idiot for thinking I would care.

I kept to myself during the party, mostly. People kept coming up to me and shaking my hand and telling me how much I liked my book, but I never gave them any answers more than a few syllables long. They all seemed very nervous, like they thought any little thing would make me fly off the handle. Apparently I had earned a reputation. I was a literary bad boy, an intellectual brat. What a jackass I was. Some of the people there reacted poorly to this and took an attitude, like who did I think I was? But I just shooed them away with a few condescending little nods and there wasn’t much they could do to recover from that, if I was going to pretend like I didn’t care about them.

Towards the end of the night, the president of the company got up behind a podium and called for the attention of the room. “We’re here tonight,” he began, “to celebrate one of the most exciting and talented writers to come along in a long time.” Scattered applause. “If you told me that our biggest release of the summer slate would be a book written to be read in the bathroom, the first thing I would have done was sold all my stock.” Hearty laughter. “But this book is poised to turn bathroom reading into a genre that can match any other in both sales and esteem.” Inappropriate chuckling. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the author of 'Uncle Chris’s Book for When You Have to Take a Shit,'” kind of flinching when it came time for him to swear, “Chris Sartinsky.”

I walked up to the podium with nothing prepared. I figured I would be able to fake my way through it on the strength of my genius and natural charisma alone.

“Thanks,” I said, and someone booed. Me? Someone was booing me? The genius author? It was a joke, is what it was, a fucking joke. But already I was scared.

“Fuck you,” I said, which took everyone aback, because I don’t think there were too many other people who had only heard the booing. But now that I had acknowledged the booer, he got louder and louder and louder, until everyone started looking around, trying to figure out who he was. The lights were shining on me, so I couldn’t see a thing.

“Show yourself, coward!” I shouted. People laughed at that for some reason. “Fuck you, what the fuck are you even doing here?”

“You suck,” he said. People laughed nervously. It seemed to me that they were taking his side.

“Can you please tell me the reason you are here?” Trying to get the upper hand, because here I felt like I was slipping.

“I’m here because of your shitty book.”

“Philistine!” More laughs. What were these people laughing at? I was very paranoid.

“You fucking suck at everything.”

“I suck? I suck? Well if I suck, then why are all these people here? Why are all these people telling me I’m the greatest writer—” and I trailed off. This was not going well for me.

“They’re all pretending,” the heckler called back. What a thing to say. I didn’t deserve that. Completely untrue. I absolutely deserved it, and worse, because I was being unthinkably awful. I don’t deserve it now, though, and the words still haunt me.

“Pretending?” I shouted, like I was trying to sound like it was inconceivable. “Pretending?” The crowd was very silent and very still. Different from the stillness after I threw that guy in the bathroom. Then, people were afraid. But this time it was horror, like they had just seen John Dillinger gunned down in front of the movie theater, and the first thing they felt was relief, but it was hard to keep feeling in the face of the blood spreading across the concrete.

I grabbed an empty glass at my right hand and threw at the feet of the first row of people, who gasped when it shattered all over their shoes. “Fuck you pretending!” Whatever that means.

Someone—the heckler, maybe, or a sympathizer—returned the favor, throwing a glass right at my head. Apparently the floor was just a bit harder than my skull, because the glass just bounced, leaving a nice healthy bruise right on my forehead. I staggered backwards and fell. There was muttering, for a moment, then silence again. I was having trouble seeing straight. “Fuck you!” I finally screamed. “Fuck you!” I started for the door and the president of Houghton Mifflin grabbed me by my shirt. He was just trying to help me, most likely, but I slugged him. I don’t know what happened to him after that—if he fell or if it even hurt him or what—because I just walked out.

I knew it was over by the time I left the hotel and got out into the street. I could never go back to that place. All I could do was wonder what I had given up. Houghton Mifflin, to their credit, did everything they could to make sure that they sold as few copies of my book as possible. Good for them, for saying to hell with money and doing what they thought was right. Have to admire that.