My name is Louis. I used to write steamy adult novels. When there were novels. My books were stocked everywhere. When there were books. This was before Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Strand gave up selling books, replacing them with long tables where people spent hours doing Japanese word games and puzzles.
By charging $10 an hour per person and continuing to market exotic coffees and teas, they were able to make their rent.
Most of you young people aren’t aware, but many successful writers then turned to the Internet, trying to sell their work to various websites to be downloaded, negotiating a rate per page. That didn’t last long, as more and more regular folks decided they wanted to expand their blogs into full-length books and the glut drove down market value.
Once our savings ran out, unqualified to do anything else, we professional writers had to sell our bodies on the street for food. I’m embarrassed to say I was picked up by the police last year for loitering, along with two people who strongly resembled Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike, and a nearly hysterical Bret Easton Ellis.
For a while many of us holed up at abandoned newspaper offices – newspapers having disappeared soon after people turned to the Internet for their information and advertisers quickly followed. Throughout a bitter winter we stayed without heat in the old Jersey Journal building in Journal Square.
When that was converted into condos we traveled north and south to the abandoned Bergen Record and Star Ledger offices respectively. Of course, eventually they too were blown up and converted.
The states of New York and New Jersey then decided we were bringing down property values with our roaming the streets begging for change. So they loaded us in trucks and drove us to Battery Park. Pete Hamill got sick and threw up on me. Then they shoved us onto a ferry and sent us to Governors Island, which is where we remain.
All in all, it’s a pretty, quiet place, perfect for writing, if we had computers or even paper. Instead we just wander around getting on each other’s nerves.
Libraries lasted a bit longer than the bookstores. But it became obvious the paper was needed for recycling to make more puzzle books. So they kept a few open, filled with laptops. The shelving was sold for firewood, being as oil and gas are so expensive.
There still was a surplus of books, but since rents and property taxes rose sky high, everyone had to downsize their living space, leaving no room for books. So every night we sit by the shoreline watching bonfires all along lower Manhattan extending into Brooklyn. I wonder how many of mine are in those cinders.
There’s a rumor Anna Quindlen smuggled in a Susan Sontag collection and has been hoarding it. She’s playing with fire, that one, as starved as we are for reading matter.
I’m lucky in a sense. I’ve memorized some of the more lurid portions of my books. If I can just get my hands on paper I could write them out and pass it around. Sure beats horseshoes. – Joe Del Priore
Joe Del Priore is a frequent contributor. His latest short play “Chicken Salad” can be seen this weekend at the One-Act Festival (See story on page 5.) at DeBaun in Hoboken. Comments on this piece can be sent to: current@hudsonreporter.com.