Who by Fire by Diana Spechler: Guest Post and Book Giveaway

49 CommentsTuesday • December 2, 2008 • by michelle

Are you a member of GoodReads?

I am, and I recommend it highly.

You can compare books with friends and also get great recommendations, as I did recently from Lara when I received an update on her bookshelf via email regarding the book Who by Fire by Diana Spechler:

I recently gave two books five stars. Then, when I started thinking about writing these reviews, I thought about offering the books to anyone who wanted them…but then realized that I simply cannot part with Who By Fire.

I was intrigued (seriously, go read Lara’s description and review), and then just a few hours later, I happened to get a message from Diana herself in my inbox about reviewing her book! Of course I jumped at the chance, but since I won’t receive the book for a little while (love you Poste Italiane!), I asked Diana if she’d like to guest post and offer a free copy to one lucky reader, and here we are.

CONTEST RULES:

1. In order to be eligible to win a free copy of Diana Sprechler’s book, Who by Fire, just leave a comment on *this* post by 11:59 p.m. CST (Italy time) on Tuesday, December 9, 2008.

2. Sorry, the contest is only open to readers with a US shipping address, but please feel free to leave comments for Diana regardless; there’s another guest post and contest coming next Tuesday for international readers as well!

Welcome Diana!

———-

Moving to New York City is sort of like moving to a Third World country with excellent tap water. First and foremost, you must learn the language: walk-up, the L, bodega, Nolita. Then you have to lower your standards: You dine with mice. You live in a closet. During rush hour, you stand in the subway, resting your face in a stranger’s armpit.

You accept jobs you haven’t had since college, or jobs you wouldn’t have touched in college: You are twenty-seven years old and tending bar on the day shift. You are twenty-seven years old and walking a bouquet of poodles. You are twenty-seven years old and standing outside a comedy club, freezing your ass off for five hours on a Sunday, forcing fliers on innocent passersby.

“Comedy show!” you scream in their faces. “Everyone likes to laugh,” you shriek without cracking a smile. You are like a telemarketer in person. You are uncharacteristically aggressive. You are horribly annoying. Your job title is part of the foreign, exotic-sounding New York City lexicon:

You are a barker. You are one who barks.

I moved from Rhode Island to Manhattan two years ago, an impulsive, passionate, I’m-going-to-do-something-for-myself-and-pretend-I-usually-don’t decision, the kind that comes from reading too many women’s magazines filled with columns called Take a YOU Break and All About You, You Fabulous Woman!, a decision I called “liberating,” by which I meant, “similar to jumping off a sky-scraper.” I had no money, no plan, no job, just an East Village apartment that a friend said she’d sublet to me while she spent six months in Michigan.

For the first few weeks, I holed up in that apartment, surfing Craig’s List, first scanning the teaching jobs, then sliding gradually down the employment totem pole until I landed on an ad that said, “HOT girls needed to work the door at a HOT comedy club. Email pictures.”

I called one of my friends and read her the ad. “Can you believe it?” I said. “It’s like, demoralizing. I would never!”

Always one to look on the bright side, my friend pointed out, “It’s better than stripping. Or escorting.”

I didn’t tell her that I was broke and desperate enough to have considered both, that the only thing stopping me was my fine breeding, a.k.a. my mother’s voice in my head: “Sex is not a recreational activity…You can’t go to synagogue with your knees exposed!…The only man you can trust is your father.” But working at a comedy club was a far cry from prostitution. After all, I would be promoting the arts. That was honorable. And it was kind of sort of like participating in the arts, which is what I should have been doing. I’d had a novel in the works for several years, and I was starting to worry that by living in New York, I was only inviting distraction from it.

After I hung up with my friend, I realized I had forgotten to ask her if I could pass for HOT.

“Whatever,” I said aloud, and I attached a picture of myself to an email: Please consider me for the comedy club position.

Apparently, I was HOT enough to be a barker, which is sort of like being STRONG enough to arm-wrestle your aunt. My new ten-dollar-an-hour job entailed standing in front of the club and distributing fliers to everyone who crossed my path. If someone brought one of my fliers (bearing my initials) to a show, he or she would get a discount at the door, and I, in addition to my hourly wage, would get a cut of the ticket price. If a passerby seemed particularly interested, I was supposed to try to sell him an actual ticket on the spot. Again, I would get a cut of the ticket price. The potential seemed limitless.

My “training” was to spend a few minutes watching other barkers bark.

Mostly, barkers are aspiring comics, who forego the hourly wage and work in exchange for stage time. Some of them made me laugh: “Comedy show,” one of them yelled. “If you miss it, you’ll get cancer.” Others were the kind of guys who cat-call girls at the mall (sexual harassers dressed up as barkers): “Hey, gorgeous. What you got goin’ on tonight? You like comedy, baby?”

I watched, cringed, took mental notes. And then I was on my own.

Back in college, in the indulgent days of lit theory classes, years before I knew I would grow up to be a barker, I threw around words like “othering” and “exoticizing,” methods of alienation employed by the majority to render the minority either ridiculous or invisible. As a barker in the Village, like an American tourist in a Third World country, I was “other.” I may as well have been wearing a fanny pack.

Some passersby treated me with disdain (“I hate comedy. I seriously hate it. Who are you anyway and why are you talking to me?”), some with glee (“Aww,” one girl said to her boyfriend. She pointed at me. “She’s so cute!”). One old woman pinched my cheek. A few people hugged me and gave me their business cards. One man dropped to his knees and kissed my hands. A group of German tourists posed for a picture with me like I was Ronald McDonald. Some drunk guy tried to grind up against me, dancing to techno music no one else could hear.

“I feel like you’re about to have sex with me,” I told him, alarmed.

He made no attempt to correct me.

But by the end of my first shift, I had sold thirteen tickets, and unloaded well over a hundred fliers.

“Wow!” my boss said. “Thirteen is amazing.”

Of course I was amazing. I was way over-qualified. I had a master’s degree, for the love of God. Social skills. Life experience. And furthermore, I was HOT. The manager counted out seventy-six dollars for me, ten for each of the five hours I had worked, plus two per ticket sold. I went straight to the bank, raising my checking account balance to one hundred fifty-six dollars. I was only one thousand forty-four dollars away from a month’s rent. I was making it in New York City.

But my first shift as a barker had also happened to be the last summer-like fall day. I had worn jeans and a tight white T-shirt, my hair pushed back from my head with sunglasses. I still had my tan from the beach. I had sold every one of those thirteen tickets to men.

“Lonely men,” my boss pointed out. “The loneliest men in the Village.”

The day of my second shift, the temperature dropped into the twenties. No one is HOT in a wool hat and a down coat. No one is HOT in snow boots. My teeth chattered.

“C-c-comedy show,” I called. “If you don’t have p-p-plans tonight…”

People rushed by me, faces tucked into collars, hats pulled low over their foreheads, numb hands jammed into pockets. No one wanted to stop and talk. Even the lonely men wanted to get home and climb under the covers.

I sold four tickets.

The next week, I sold two per shift. The temperature continued to plummet. So did my motivation. During my shifts, I spent most of the five hours fighting hypothermia, distracting myself by talking to the comics that came by the club looking for stage time, or to the people who would come out of the bar next door to smoke cigarettes on the sidewalk. My sales dwindled to zero. I sipped coffee from the bodega on the corner. I breathed warm air onto my freezing fingers.

“We’re losing money on you,” my boss said. “I know it’s cold out, but you have to step it up. Maybe you need to work on your pitch?”

My pitch: “Great comedy show tonight, guys….Hey, do you like stand-up comedy?…Hi there. What do you have going on tonight?”

It wasn’t my pitch that needed work.

“I think I need to work on my life,” I said.

Being around aspiring comedians all day had become an uncomfortable reminder that I was ignoring my own dreams, neglecting my writing, not finishing the novel I desperately wanted to finish.

So I renounced my career as a barker.

I’d like to say I never had to work a dumb job again because my writing career took off and soared high above the New York City skyline. I’d like to say I’m living in a brownstone on the Upper East Side, that I’m VIP at every lounge in the city, that I can afford Broadway shows and boutique jewelry and Prada bags and all the other things that Manhattan dangles like diamond-encrusted carrots before the twitching snouts of the terminally broke.

But in reality, I picked up a job waiting tables at an Israeli restaurant, where I was literally the only American, where the Mexican guys who shaved shawarma off the spit spoke Hebrew, and the rabbi who checked the lettuce for bugs spoke Spanish.

But here’s the thing about arriving in a strange land: Eventually, it stops being strange. Within a few months of living in New York, I knew rudimentary Hebrew and rudimentary Spanish. I could read the subway maps with fluency. I knew which bodega sold the cheapest toilet paper, what to spray to kill roaches, and which bars had the best happy hour specials. And yeah, eventually, I did finish my novel.

Best of all, though, whereas New York makes some people hard, it’s made me a little softer. Or at least, a little more empathic. Whenever I see a tourist poring over a map, I ask if he needs help. At bars and restaurants, I tip 25%. And whenever I pass a barker in the Village or Times Square, I stop, take her flier, look her in the eye and thank her. And then I ask whoever I’m with if he thinks she’s as HOT as I am.

———–

Thanks so much Diana!

Remember to leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of

P.S. If you aren’t eligible for the contest but stll want to leave a comment, please note that you’re “international” so I don’t include your name in the drawing. Thanks! And be sure to check out The Scribbit Message Board for lots more giveaways!