Dice
Adventures in Livingness
By: Louellen Smiley
The throw of the dice this week lands on adventures in living on the other side. Just when I put my finger on truth, the truth comes back modified.
The growing up with gangsters columns were like that, sometimes I’d superimpose a bit of falseness to minimize the harshness. I was writing for a community newspaper, and exposing my family history for the first time. The truth came back; it squeezed in there between readings, or after I’d sent the column for publication. The confrontation of my own judgment; I didn’t approve of what I had written. I hadn’t told the truth
I received letters of encouragement from friends, and once in awhile someone from the wrinkled pages of the past would respond. The garage doorman where I lived with my father in Hollywood discovered my column in a search for Allen Smiley. He wrote me several stories, and confided his genuine respect toward my father, who treated him very cordially. He also said word got around the Doheny Towers to do what Smiley says, or else.
The gangster columns always surprised me after they were written. You don’t know what you remember until you begin writing. Entire conversations replayed so effortlessly from so many years ago.
Without readers, that wrote back they wanted more, I wouldn’t have continued. Had I stopped writing about that subject, then I wouldn’t have had all that practice. It took a lot of practice; like playing an instrument, or learning to dance. Writing about a subject I was forbidden to even think about, was liberating, and it freed up a part of me that was caught in self deception. Sharing the history with a community newspaper is different than sending it into the world. If the subject wasn’t so forbidden and complex; there would be a lot more memoirs by descendants of organized crime figures. Imagine reading the memoir of Benjamin Siegel’s daughter. You never will. Nor anyone related to him.
None of my articles were published nationally until a few months ago. I had been in a feverish temperament to get published and submitted something almost every morning the moment I woke up. I felt empowered hitting up the major newspapers, and magazines. Sipping coffee and streaming in absolute absorption of getting published; it was a very satisfying feeling. It’s like going into the dressing room in a department store, and allowing those three way mirrors to reflect every inch of you. Once you get used to it, it’s not so bad, and besides, no one looks good in a three way mirror except nature and children. I was up to about forty submissions, when I decided to send a note to a friend who worked at the New York Post. I was trained not to ask for favors, because you know in the world my father lived in, ‘a favor can kill you faster than a bullet’ (that line is from Carlito’s Way, but it really applies to the whole thing). I sent a note in defiance of this training, and asked if he thought this might work for the Post. Joe replied that he’d run it upstairs to an editor he knew.
Several days later, I received a note from the editor; she’d like to run a story in the Sunday edition, and would I write something up about growing up with gangsters. My swivel desk chair spun around, you know, and I did a double jump, a few more sporadic yelps and then I had to get busy. It was Thursday, and she wanted it by Friday. All the material was on the hard drive, and even more accessible it was in my head, memorized from so many submissions and queries. We worked on the piece together; she was really terrific to work with and she shaped it up beautifully.
On Sunday I went looking for the Post; and there wasn’t a book shelf in the city that carried it. Then my New York pal Joey called up, “I got the paper—yea—it’s great, like the whole page.” The whole page I thought to myself. “There’s a few photographs of your mother and father, the photo of you is a thumbprint.” The irony is that the Times used to write about my parents, Winchell and another columnist, things like, “Smiley and Casey are imaging,” I couldn’t figure that out—at first.
Viewing the Post online isn’t the same as in print, but I sat back and enjoyed the feeling of finality. For me that was it, it was over, unless they wanted more columns, I was basking in the election of a column in a national publication with over one million readers.
That wasn’t the end of it. The Post became pre-occupied with Elliott Spitzer, and then the elections, and so my submissions are on hold. What I hadn’t anticipated was a call from a literary agent asking to read what I’d written. I mentioned I was working on a memoir in the byline. It caught me off guard, like all the great surprises and disappointments, they just never happen when you expect them. I told this agent I’d send a chapter and overview. I had to catch my breath; I was caught. The memoir was in the trunk, the trunk I closed because it deluded my thinking, my eating, and my living. I hadn’t worked on it since 2005.
I pulled together a sample chapter and sent it off to New York. I’d waited up to three months for a reply in the past, only to receive a scribbled note written in a moment of haste, ‘not for me, or I’ll pass.’ The agent called me personally, and I took the cell phone outside, and while he talked, I looked at the sky and tried to sound calm. He was enthusiastic; and he had represented mob related stories for twenty years. Though the writing was not acceptable, he’d have his editor make comments, and returned to me along with a contract.
I was standing outside, looking right through to that other side, the one I’d dreamt about for twenty years. The sky fell in my lap. Unbelieving, in the same manner that follows news of a death you hadn’t expected, for days– even weeks I couldn’t grasp it. What made the whole episode more intense was that this same agent had read some of my work, in novel form, twenty years ago, and passed on it.
That is why the columns are arriving later and with less frequency; because I am writing the memoir in earnest. I’m on the other side of the dream, and there is no more room for hiding, shading the truth, or giving up.
I’m still throwing the dice and the columns will continue throughout this process. Thank you reader for keeping me in practice!
Any dice to throw email: folliesls@aol.com
