Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

40. two bunch, too

Looking back on my life, as I’ve been doing in these pages, I’m reminded again of my great good fortune to have been a writer during the golden age of American publishing. On second thought, I suppose publishing’s golden age actually was the twenties through the forties; when Maxwell Perkins was bringing out Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and Hemingway, not to mention James Jones, Faulkner popping over the horizon; you know, back before television would do to reading what panty hose would do to heavy petting. My period of peak production — the late seventies through the nineties — might more accurately be described as “the golden age of expense accounts.”

During those years, my novels and those of many other authors were launched with elaborate parties in New York clubs. On tour, I was lodged in spacious suites in the best hotels; fed in fine restaurants, where, when I traveled with Terry Bromberg and Barry Dennenberg from the promotion department, we’d sometimes order every dessert on the menu. Barry would read off the desserts to us, one by one, in tones and with emotions that rivaled James Earl Jones reciting the Emancipation Proclamation. (We called it “The Barrysburg Address.”)

I’m still not sure where my agent Phoebe and I got the nerve or how we managed to pull this off, but we somehow convinced Bantam Books that I was dead set against shipping manuscript pages of a book-in-progress to New York for approval. Phoebe would hand-deliver an opening chapter or two, on the strength of which I’d usually receive a contract and a monetary advance against future royalties. After that, when the company felt the need to check on my progress, one or more editors had to travel to me; had to meet me in some location of my choosing, where, once they’d settled down and divested themselves of their New York buzz, then and only then they’d be shown fresh pages to read. They’d make notes, ask questions, and we’d discuss any suggestions they might propose, after which they’d return the pages. It was called an “editorial conference,” and two or more would be scheduled for each novel.

Should this strike you as rather presumptuous on my part, you’re probably not just whistling Sinatra. On the other hand, the halls of publishing houses were not sufficiently insulated from the ongoing amphetamine pace of Manhattan, and while the prevailing physical and psychological hubbub, the busyness of it all, might actually be a fitting accompaniment to the contemplation of fast-paced thrillers, or for that matter, tomes a-twitch with Jewish, Irish, or Episcopalian angst, a meaningful assessment of my sentences, quirky in ways different from Eastern Seaboard quirkiness, required of an editor, if not exactly a West Coast sensibility, at least a mind relaxed enough to follow the charmer’s pipes out of the familiar, well-paved neighborhoods of syntax and story line and into a kind of wild, neo-druidic grove, emblazoned with poppies, woodpeckers, spotted toadstools, and a painted pagoda where the Language Wheel is banged like a gong and no Ivy League creative-writing professor would ever have been caught smiling let alone dead.

The location I selected for almost all of those editorial conferences was Two Bunch Palms, a health spa near Desert Hot Springs, a hundred miles east of Los Angeles. Like Timbuktu, Two Bunch is an oasis. Unlike the potable spring around which Timbuktu had sprung up, the spring at Two Bunch is hot, laced with minerals, and continually gurgles up what tests have shown to be the second most therapeutic waters on earth, second only to Baden Baden. The natural mineral pool lies in a rustic grotto, lushly surrounded by palm trees and other semitropical foliage, and by moonlight verges on the genuinely magical.

Early in its history, Two Bunch Palms was the desert hideaway of the gangster Al Capone, who operated a private casino there. The small rooms beneath the former casino, where nowadays the finest massage practitioners in America perform their restorative rub-a-dub-dub, were, during Capone’s tenure, cribs for prostitutes. This history lends a faint air of naughtiness to the otherwise relentlessly wholesome place and acts as a defense against forebodings of woo-woo.

If one can’t relax at Two Bunch Palms, one can’t relax anywhere, but in the beginning my editors from Bantam put up a valiant resistance. The evening that Steve Rubin and Matthew Shear arrived there, for instance, they were not only almost audibly crackling with New York intensity, they broadcast ill-concealed vectors of resentment: not exactly thrilled about being lured into that all-too-alien environment. Despite having fortified themselves with martinis on the plane, they were poised to get right to work. I, however, refused to allow them even a peek at my pages until they’d had at least one massage and a soak in the pool.

The editors somewhat begrudgingly complied, and by the second day, each of them was walking around about two inches off the ground, hanging from a smile. In their central nervous systems you could have heard a pin drop. Steve, who had never before been massaged and who was initially suspicious of the very idea, would go back to New York and hire a masseuse to work on him twice a week. Our editorial sessions progressed as smoothly as massage oil, and thereafter I never had to petition for a meeting at the spa. Word spread at Bantam, creating some jealousy, and periodically I’d receive calls from Matthew, Steve, or a successor, asking how the book was coming along and, almost plaintively, if it wasn’t about time for another conference at Two Bunch.

Bear in mind that Bantam was picking up the tab for those sessions, including transportation, lodging, meals, and spa treatments (usually two daily), for the editor or editors, for me, my agent, and whatever wife or girlfriend I might have invited along. It’s safe to say that in today’s economy such lovely expense-account indulgence is a thing of the past, especially since that upstart pair of dinky little digits — the insubstantial 0 and the barely substantial 1 — rode the e-train into the publishing world, with its alphabets and vocabularies, its warehouses of wood pulp and reservoirs of ink, and turned it sideways if not upside down.

When in 2000 it came time to edit Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates — my novel about the CIA, the Virgin Mary, and the maverick operative who loves, hates, and redefines them both — well, things having already changed, I shipped all the pages to New York via FedEx, massaged my wife’s neck, and ran myself a bath in our tub. Tibetan Peach Pie? When I’m convinced that it’s finished, I’ll hit the send key on the computer and, both wistfully and with some trepidation, leave it up to the 0 and the 1.