Don Lee - The Collective

Joshua frowned upon these temptations. “You need to be willing to live on the street to be an artist,” he’d say. “Getting sucked into a career is an invitation to bail. It makes it too easy to give up. It makes it almost inevitable that you will.”

There was certainly no danger of Palaver ever becoming a career for me. The magazine had just been turned down for an NEA grant (panel conclusion: the journal didn’t publish enough women and writers of color), and our funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council had just been halved. We couldn’t afford to hire anyone to help me in the Watertown office. I was working solo in the shithole, save for a couple of itinerant interns, and it was likely that, unless a new grant came through, my hours would soon have to be cut drastically — possibly eliminated altogether.

My immediate preoccupation, though, was taking delivery of the new issue and preparing to send it off by presorted third-class bulk mail.

I would have to unload and wheel in about forty boxes — each weighing fifty pounds — from the delivery truck, and stack them in the office. I would then have to stamp a thousand Jiffy No. 1 mailing bags with two impressions: Palaver ’s return address on the top left, the bulk-mailing permit indicia on the top right. Stuff each envelope with a copy of the issue and close the flap with three staples. Stick on the subscriber address labels and sort the envelopes into bundles according to zip code. Wrap two rubber bands around each bundle by length and girth, then cram them into No. 3 canvas sacks. Tag each sack for delivery to the proper district hub. Rent a cargo van from U-Haul and load, transport, and unload the fifty or so sacks at the post office in Harvard Square — a total of twelve hundred pounds.

I was in the middle of bundling and sorting envelopes when Joshua made his maiden visit to the office.

“Jesus, this place is a dump,” he said. “I had no fucking idea.”

The storefront office was sandwiched between a T-shirt shop and a pizza parlor on Waverley Avenue. One long room, the place was furnished with castoffs and street finds and stuffed with boxes of unsold issues and masses of junk, a museum of antiquated publishing paraphernalia: broken typewriters, light boxes, T-squares, strips of old Linotype, paste-ups of covers and galleys.

“Not a good time,” I told Joshua. He had gone to the RMV in Watertown to renew his license and had asked to stop by on the way back. Reluctantly I had given him directions, but had said he couldn’t stay long.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I summarized the undertaking at hand.

“Why do you have to do this?” Joshua said. “Can’t you get interns or something?”

“It’s faster if I do it myself.”

“Look at yourself, dude.”

My T-shirt was wet with sweat, my jeans filthy. My forearms were scratched from lugging boxes, my hands black from the inkpad, and my fingertips bled from wayward staple prongs.

“You are being fucking exploited , man,” Joshua said. “You’re being treated like a slave . And you know why?”

I heaved another stack of envelopes to the sorting table. “Why?”

“Because you’re Asian,” he said. “Paviromo assumes, since you’re Asian, that you’re meticulous and good with numbers and conscientious — read: docile —like all Asians are, so he’ll make you do all the shit work, the clerical and computer crap, but damn if he’ll ever let you touch anything that involves any aesthetic sensibilities or, God forbid, any real editing.”

What he was saying was accurate. The only thing Paviromo allowed me to do editorially was screen the fiction manuscripts in the slush pile. Occasionally I’d uncover a terrific story, but Paviromo never once accepted any of the submissions I passed on to him. “Can we have this conversation later?” I said to Joshua. “I’m a little busy here, if that’s not obvious enough.”

But Joshua wouldn’t leave. He poked around the office, playing with the Pantone flip book, punching keys on the old broken Olivetti typewriter (“You know Cormac McCarthy has used the same Lettera 32 since 1963?”), cutting some scraps of Lino with an X-Acto knife.

“If you’re bored,” I said, “you can take off. I’ll be okay by myself.”

But then he discovered the stacks. Palaver didn’t publish book reviews, but the journal did run a list of “Books Received” in the back of every issue, in the tiniest print, a curious feature (the lists were arbitrary in what they included, not at all comprehensive) whose sole purpose was to ensure that we were sent free books and advance reader editions by publishers.

“This is a fucking gold mine,” Joshua said. “I can’t believe you’ve been holding these out on me.”

He began pawing through the stacks, which were heaped precariously against the wall. We didn’t have enough shelves for the books and the many literary journals with which we exchanged subscriptions, so I had crisscrossed some bungee cords to keep them from falling over. He tugged out the new William Trevor, the new Gass and Sebald and Beattie. “Can I have this?” he kept asking.

He smuggled the books into the backseat of his Peugeot and then, for a late lunch, bought a meatball grinder (jumbo, with extra provolone and mayonnaise) at the pizza parlor next door, eating it in the office while I continued to label and sort and rubber-band. “Don’t you have to go home and work on your novel?” I asked.

When at last he was about to leave, we heard the screen door creak open, and unexpectedly, Paviromo, wearing his trademark blue suit and dapper bow tie, blustered in. Usually he never came to the office except to drop off the mail every few days.

“Oh, what’s this?” he said. “An interloper in our midst, breaching the sanctum sanctorum?”

They introduced themselves. “Yes, yes,” Paviromo said. “I read your story in the North American Review . Fabulous, I thought. I’m good friends with Robley, you know.” Over the years, whenever one of Joshua’s stories came out in a journal, I always pointed it out to Paviromo, but never imagined he would actually read one of them. “Robley kept boasting about it. It was nominated for a Pushcart and got on some other short lists, correct?”

“Nominated, but not ultimately selected,” Joshua said.

“Mandarins and halfwits, the committees that make these decisions.”

Joshua, easily charmed by this sort of flattery, grinned broadly.

They gossiped about this year’s prize annuals, opining which stories were best and which shouldn’t have been included, Paviromo confounded and outraged that Palaver had not parlayed more selections. One writer in particular intrigued them. Her story, which had been her first publication, had snared the literary triple crown, the trifecta, picked for all three prize anthologies: The Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize , and The O. Henry Awards . The woman had a compelling background, raised on a hippie farm in rural Pennsylvania, studying at Columbia and the Sorbonne, writing screenplays with her Argentine film director boyfriend, teaching English and coaching girls’ soccer in a village in Punjab, Pakistan. She also happened to be young, twenty-eight, the same age as Joshua and me, and drop-dead gorgeous. New York magazine ran a two-page photo spread on her, glammed up like a movie star. Agents and editors were clamoring after her. All for publishing one little short story, which was, Paviromo and Joshua admitted, dazzlingly good.

“She’ll be a phenom,” Paviromo said. “It’s all before her.”

“In the palm of her hand,” Joshua said.

“Let’s salute the girl with a drink.” From a file cabinet drawer, Paviromo pulled out a bottle of Macallan’s single malt that I had not known was there. “Eric? Care for a nip?”