It was the phone calls that were the bane of my existence. Most of those who called were probably hardworking folks who showed courage just by picking up the phone. By God, I hated them.

Slush calls were tedious, time-consuming and instantly recognizable, starting always with the caller telling me where she was from. "Hi, this is Rhoda James from Tallahassee, Fla.?" Then a pause. I never understood what I was expected to say to that. Perhaps I should inquire as to the weather in Tallahassee? Or did Ms. James want to assure me that she wasn't that other Rhoda James, the slutty one from Dallas? (Sometimes a caller would clarify that she was calling "long distance" from Tallahassee. I took this as a hint that I should talk fast.)

"How are you doing today?" the caller would continue cheerily. Pause. "Fine," I'd grunt. As if she cared that I was facing five deadlines and catching a cold. Then Ms. James, explaining that she had a novel/management guide/memoir to submit, would describe her manifesto to me in intimate detail and no matter how I tried to cut her off with the submission guidelines (cover letter, first three chapters, SASE), she'd doggedly continue with the story of how she'd battled back from pneumonia and learned to appreciate life. And oh, she'd rather not send the first three chapters. Could she send chapters 5, 12, and 27 instead?

The callers who irked me most were those who hadn't done their homework and were using me as some sort of research tool. They asked me how to publish a book, how to get an agent, what kinds of books we published. One gentleman inquired, "When you publish my book, how much will you pay me?" Another wanted to know, "How many copies of a book do you usually print?" (When I said it depended, he countered, "So, what then? Millions?") I was astonished at these questions; I couldn't imagine dialing the general number at Miramax and asking how to make a movie. There's a place you can find this information, people. It's called a bookstore. Look into it.

What callers didn't, and couldn't, know was that aside from handling slush I had a busy full-time job as an editorial assistant, and thus the less time I spent on the phone answering their questions, the happier we would all be. But no such luck. While I took care not to act overtly rude or dismissive, in time the sound of my phone ringing got me so tense that I needed to act out. I changed my voice every time I answered the phone, alternating between perky, professional and vaguely patronizing. As a caller chattered, I'd silently eat my lunch or conduct elaborate conversations in sign language with colleagues passing by. After a while, pricked by resentment and guilt, I stopped answering the phone altogether.

- -- - - - - - - - - -

Letter to a friend after one month on the job:

"I've realized that I have to stop being so nice to them [slush callers] because I don't have time to sit there and listen to someone talk to me for 15 minutes about their novel entitled 'Bill Cosby in Heaven,' which I have been assured is more literary than their other novel about a kid who escapes from the Waco cult to blow away his stepfather and all the other people who bug him."

- -- - - - - - - - - -

Then there were the crazies. Writers, of course, are infamously neurotic, but slush-pile writers are a different breed altogether. Take, for example, the caller who told me, in rushed, slightly slurred speech, that he wanted to submit his poems on "love, death, sex and my mother." Somehow he managed to inform me that he'd been in and out of the mental institution and hadn't had sex in eight years. When I gave him our prohibitive poetry guidelines, he thanked me and said he guessed he'd "go back to praying to Bobby Kennedy."

Another gentleman called saying that he was only in town from Germany for one day, and would I please read his manuscript sooner than the standard two months, or discuss it with him over a cup of coffee? After ignoring my repeated refusals, he showed up in our lobby. "There's a man here who wants to talk to you," the receptionist whispered, "and I think he's crazy." Weary and pissed off, I broke down and agreed to read his manuscript and leave it at the front desk for him by the end of the day. The lanky blond beamed as he offered me a blank manila envelope. I barked at him to include his name. He wrote simply, "Karl."

Recent Stories