I Need a Fucking Cigarette

When I was a kid I moved around a lot with my mother from apartment to apartment, but the most memorable one of these was one we spent about three years in, from my second to fourth grade. It was a basement apartment in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia, about three blocks from where I went to school. It was a miserable little place with hard linoleum tiles intended to look like wood. Sometimes kids would break into the back alley behind our windows and you could see them, or at least from their feet to their waists, as they basically ran through our living room. It was dark, it was damp, all the wood in the house would bend from the moisture in the summer and straighten out in the winter once more. My mom was getting her grad degree in social work at Temple at the time, working a full shift at the Financial Aid office to pay for everything. She spent all night talking on the telephone, drinking Pepsi, and smoking True Greens. This was her social life. I sat next to her and watched TV till it was time to go to sleep. The windows were always closed (because otherwise someone might climb through them) and the room was engulfed in a menthol fog by 7:30pm. I usually didn't go to sleep until eleven. (Second-hand smoke hadn't been invented yet.)

For the most part I avoided smoking outside the house; to me there was no glamor in it. So I made it through high school and college without getting hooked. Even at the University of Wales-Swansea, where all my friends smoked, I made it without the slightest temptation. Smoking was just something that other people did and I didn't.

After college I was a Watson Fellow, jumping around Europe and Africa. Mostly though, I was jumping around London, and it was while I was there that I started hanging with "K." K worked the graveyard shift at a video warehouse, a boring, undemanding job that could only be made bearable by being stoned out of his head. The thing is, spliff was expensive in London, and usually came in the form of hash bricks, so it had to be sprinkled into a tobacco cigarette and re-rolled. I spent months like this, going over to K's at 6pm when he woke up, shooting the shit with him as we passed the joint until it was 11:30pm and he was off to work and I was off to a club or bed.

When this era was over, and I was back in Philly and on the verge of a massive depression, I found that to top everything off I was going through, I was going through withdrawal too. Not from the cannabis, which is what I had been conscious that I'd been smoking, but from the nicotine I hadn't given two thoughts to.

Without even realizing I was joining the hellbound club, I had become a smoker.


I never fully gave in to the urge, or at least accepted my reality. Usually, while in grad school, I would buy a pack, or two, or three, or damn all the way up to five, and I would smoke them obsessively, smoking till I was sick, all the while telling myself that I was getting my fill and that this would allow me to stop. And I would stop, for a month or two, maybe even three. And then I would have one more and then I would be back puffing again. Trying to quit after this pack, or trying to quit after the next one. I have never been good at moderation with anything in my life. If I were one of my own fictional characters, that would be my tragic flaw. This over the top obsessive behavior is what makes me good at writing novels, and not good at life itself. I tried cold turkey, and it didn't work (it never does). I tried acupuncture, which kind of turned me on in a kinky way but that was about it. So I smoked and stopped and smoked and stopped, for a decade. Squashing it at home and binging on the road. Hating myself for it but doing it anyway.




When I went back to London last spring, I didn't see K., but I did see "B.," his ex and my friend. When she saw me light up at a little cafe in Brixton, she was shocked that I was smoking, something I actually didn't do when I lived there. When I told her how K. had hooked me, she told me that K. had quit a decade ago, right after I left for the States and was just getting started on my habit. The fucking bastard.

Worse yet, all of London was going smoke free. The gray city itself, the place where people smoke everywhere and cancer seemed like a nasty rumor started by the Germans, even London was moving on without me.

So Vic and I went to a pub, and we drank our pints, and then I left my pack of Nat Sherman MCDs on the table there. Left them to disappear into the nicotine cloud behind me.

And I haven't smoked since.

THE END[ing is not here]

Wouldn't it be great if that's where the story really did end? Well it would but it didn't because you can't turn desire off and on like that. It's not that I've smoked since: I haven't, I really fucking haven't. But shit I want to. I want to bad. I want to so bad that an improved chance at an extended life means little to me. Be around to see my grandkids? Shit, I don't even know them. Live a better life? What good is a life where you can't have what you want? Life is overrated to beginning with, with all of its loss and disappointments. Give me a fucking cigarette.


But still, I'm not smoking.

You know what's keeping me from smoking? I'll tell you. It's not love, it's not responsibility, it's not all the little mortality facts that assholes tell you when you've got a fag in your hand, it's not having to stand out in front of bars and restaurants on cold days to get my embarrassingly little nicotine fix. It's that first cigarette back. That first cigarette back after you've quit for a while tastes like pickled cat shit. And not only does it taste horrible, reminding you of what a crap addiction cigarettes are in the first place, but on top of that you get hit with the crushing wave of guilt because once again you fucked up, you couldn't hang, you couldn't hold out, and even though that first cigarette tastes absolutely awful you know you're going to smoke another one right after. Because that's how it works. And then, no matter how long you stopped or how bad you tortured yourself, you're right the fuck back again.

That's what keeps me from smoking. Because without the crutch of a cigarette to lean on, I don't think I could handle that shit.


(Smoke'em if you got'em.)

Through the Walls

When I was doing my MFA thing I lived in a shitty little tenement apartment in Harlem with Victor Lavalle, there we both finished the first books that would get our careers off the ground. The place was mouse infested, falling apart, and loud, but for a while it was home and a place to hide from the rest of the city in. At night though, usually at about 10pm or so, I would hear this sound through the living room walls. Somewhere in the next building over, at full volume an old record player would drop its needle down and after a few loops of scratches a melancholy song would come on that would start out sorrowful and then slowly build to agony. Even through the walls it was clearly the most beautiful thing, and the most heartbreaking. And then at the end of the song, the needle would pick up, and there would be silence for about two seconds, and then the needle would drop back at the beginning, and the song would play all over again. This audio cycle would continue until 6:30 in the following morning.

Some older man came home and drank his sorry black ass to the point where he could wallow in his own loss and misery, and then he put on that song so he could wallow some more. And then he passed out, I assume, the sound of his ruin repeating endlessly beyond him. This is what I decided. When the music stopped a few months later, I decided as well that the man (and I assumed it to be a man) had either been gentrified out of Harlem or had finally died. But I didn't know. Part of me didn't want to know. Whatever his loss, whatever wrong turn he had taken in his life, it seemed like if you knew of it the weight it would crush you as well. It was enough to imagine him reeking of Colt 45 and English Leather in his 1960s polyester thrift shop clothes, his hair dyed and greasy and showing its grey roots against too black ends, waking up to his urine stained pants in the morning in a room decorated in stained photos of flair suited men and woman with big glasses, both standing besides Lincolns and Cadillacs. But what I did wonder was, What the hell is that song?

After that, I forgot about it for a while. One time, years later, I was watching a documentary about the Stax record label, and instantly I recognized the basic sound of the band and knew my mystery song had to be a Stax song. There is a line in Drop about the music through the wall, where I cannibalized this experience for some ambient description. But besides that, there seemed nothing more to learn about it.

Then one day about two years ago I was traveling through an airport for some literati thing, just trying to make my connection, and I heard the song. I hadn't heard or thought about the thing in years but I heard that bop-bop-bop-bop beat and instantly it all came back to me. I stopped what I was doing and headed into the Starbucks it was coming out of. The woman behind the counter looked at me like I was nuts when I asked desperately for the song's name pointing me towards the cd basket. The song still playing, going into its last screaming throws, I searched through their pre-packaged compilation trying to find it, but nothing there was even close. In desperation, I turned to the long line and said loudly over the airport bustle, "Does anybody know what song this is?" Most people seemed to have another answer on their minds, specifically to the question "Is this dude crazy?" One guy in the back, seeing that I was standing there waiting for an answer, said, "I think it's Otis Redding." Others agreed, although I think they would have agreed to anything to keep the line moving.

After that I went through iTunes entire Otis Redding catalog trying to find the song. I figured it was an obscure b-side, so went through everything but the greatest hits album to find it. I'm glad I did this, not because it was faster (it turned out the song was #1 of the "Best of" album), but because I fell in love with Otis Redding's music utterly and completely in that brief time.

This is the song, Otis Redding's "These Arms of Mine":



If this was a fair universe, all men would be able to sing like Otis Redding when they wanted to, when they needed to. Not to diss Marvin Gaye, or Teddy Pendergrass or whatever brother is your favorite crooner, but Otis Redding sang like a man. Utterly strong but completely vulnerable, smooth without affectation, without restraint but still like he could carry the world in his big brown hands. Sensitive and heartfelt and masculine all at the same time.



Fuck Elvis, I want to impersonate this man.

Mat Goes Down

There are two stereotypical ways men deal with sickness, and they are completely contradictory. One is that when men get even just a little sick, they revert to a moaning and complaining five-year-old that expects to be completely babied. The other notion is that when men get ill they just suck it up and pretend like nothing is wrong and refuse to go the doctor, even when it is absurdly obvious that they must. So far this year, I’ve managed to prove both of these stereotypes to at least be somewhat based on realty.

I’ve been down with the flu three times this winter, and during that time I groaned and collapsed and complained and generally drove my wife crazy. This went on for roughly two months, between January and February, and I got hit harder than I’ve been in years. Not only was I down, but at different times also my three little kids, and eventually my wife as well. It was completely exhausting, overwhelming painful, and it pretty much turned me off to the topic of sickness in general.

So Saturday night, I started having a sore throat, and I ignored it. By Sunday, the pain was so great I was no longer able to really swallow. I was also drooling constantly, but such are the humiliations of life. By Monday, I could barely move, had a really high fever, and cold sweats that made it impossible to sleep. My tonsils were so swollen that the slightest quiver back there felt like knifes being shoved into the deep tissue. But I didn’t complain, I just tried to suck it up and let it pass. Mostly, I laid on the couch and watched reruns of The Deadliest Catch and focused on guys who were in worse shape then I was. By Tuesday, I was pretty much delirious. I tried drinking water regularly, but it just took a really long time to drink even a little, and I was loosing fluids constantly. My hatred of doctors’ offices (the rude receptionists, the arrogance of setting appointments only to make you wait in the lobby and then again in the room) meant I have no general physician.

By order of my wife, I was finally forced off the couch to the emergency room. I figured had Strep Throat (correctly it turned out), and I knew that required a lab test and meds, but still I didn’t want the bother. Because I am a macho asshole, I insisted on driving myself. The only good that came out of this move was that my wife didn’t have to witness me nearly pass out during my interview with the nurse there, who (after admonishing me from not coming in two days ago) asked me, “Do you always roll your eyes back into your head after you say a sentence?” Nor would I have wanted her or the kids to have seen me go into near cardiac arrest after they gave me a steroid shot, which resulted in my heart rate going into overdrive, my body temperature to shoot up, and me to pass out again. Nor would I have wanted them to see me, three hours later after all the oxygen, cardiac monitors, and IVs were removed, begging to be discharged so I could drive myself home once more.

I’m on bed rest now, for the rest of the week. My classes are cancelled, although I’m surrounded by papers to grade. I feel weak, but generally fine. Still, I’m not getting out of this bed for a couple of days. That’s not a complaint, though. That’s a fact.

"What You Swatting At?"

This is the video that has been looping in my head all week. It's crass, to some offensive, and I have not been able to stop laughing at it for years.

Like all great satire, it points out the absurdity of its target by taking that target's intellectual underpinnings to their logical extreme. Here the target is European-America's Reconstruction era fantasy of slavery, epitomized in the still vibrant corporate brand names of Aunt Jemima pancakes and Uncle Ben's rice. Of course, on our shelves today Aunt Jemima has been modernized to look like she could be the Secretary of State, but no one has forgotten her recent slave scarf past. In the video, see how Aunt Jemima busts into her husband's commercial with her huge smile and pile of pancakes, eager like the race traitor she is to coon it up for white America, as personified by the camera. It is all of black America that yells back at her, through Morgan, to shut up.

While satirizing one corporate icon, this Saturday Night Live sketch smartly links that attack to the same white supremacist notions about American chattel slavery that were also presented in the movie Song of the South: that slavery was an idyllic state for African Americans, who lived in childlike simplicity in the loving care of their captors. It is still rather stunning how many white Americans cling to that notion, that fantasy, and refuse to acknowledge the toxicity of the ideological roots behind such notions. Cut and paste this link to visit a Song of the South fan site to see an example of this: http://www.songofthesouth.net/ . They seem to me much like children nostalgically clinging to a worn out, now hazardous toy. It is from this movie that the clip takes its art direction: the perpetual sunsets, the flushed coloring, and of course the animated Disneyesque bluebirds fluttering on Uncle Jemima's shoulders. The latter leading to the funniest line in the piece, "What you swatting at?"

A Great Migration

For years I have listened while my Caribbean and African friends who live in this country smugly complain about their black American neighbors, saying that many of us are unmotivated, lazy, and shiftless. These critics usually cite the success of their own ethnic groups in America in comparison with African American failures as proof of our inferiority. It always upset me when they did this. Not because they were insulting my people—I'm used to that—but because this is such a stupid and disingenuous argument.

There are of course countless unmotivated, lazy, and shiftless West Indians and Africans too, it's just that those people are still walking the streets of Kingston and Port-au-Prince and Bridgetown and Lagos and Abidjan. When it comes to work ethics and motivation, immigrant groups are not representative of their entire nations. Instead, they are people defined by their overpowering will and determination, traits which enabled them travel out across the world and start a new life in a strange land.

In light of this however, I think I have found the key to black America's future. We are, of course, one of the only two ethnic groups that did not come to the USA as immigrants. Maybe that is what needs to be rectified. To come into our own in the 21st Century, maybe we too should become an immigrant group. Maybe we, the hardworking, freethinking, self-motivated African Americans, should just get the hell out of here.

Here are my suggestions for our new host countries:

1. Ghana.
Accra's a big city with a surprisingly low crime rate, stable government, and an historic tolerance of African Americans (big ups to Kwame Nkrumah). W. E. B. Dubois's grave site is there, and so is a significant African American expat population. The beaches are nice, the clubs are fun, and it's cheap!!!

Check out these digs near Tema. That house is like out of a Biggie video. Guess how much they're selling it for. Can't you just see us out there, chilling by the pool, drinking Star beer while watch the Sixers on the satellite?

2. Jamaica.
Specifically, Treasure Beach, where the Calabash Literary Festival happens. I was a guest for the first year of the festival, it's a rather amazing event. Roger Guenveur Smith bought a house down there. Shouldn't we all follow the brother's lead? Treasure Beach is quiet, on the water, artsy, and you can also get a dope house on the cheap there too. I like this place, which is also for under $200K USD.

Anybody else have ideas on possible destinations?

on The Roots, Philly, and Black Boho Identity

In 1991, my cousin Ben lived in South Philadelphia at Fourth and Monroe, in a little townhouse shell that my aunt has long since abandoned. I still lived in the neighborhood I was born in, Germantown, but to get to my cousin’s house I had to walk from Market East Station at the Gallery II, heading straight down 10th to South Street, and then cutting up the alley of East Passyunk, right past Fifth Street. I spent years hanging out at the former Spike's Skates on that block before it closed, so knew the landscape pretty well. Right there on the corner there used to be a florist, and after 3pm they would dump the day-old flowers right in the back, and I’d long made it a habit to go through the pile to see what was salvageable. So one day, I was heading right past this exact spot and I saw that instead of the day’s trash on the curb there was this gang of dudes, about 20 of them, hovering around nervously, pacing in circles around this white boy tuning an upright bass and chubby dude who was piecing together a drum set. I paused, sat down on a curb across the street and waited as well, just curious. And then they started jamming. And I started listening. And I’ve been listening ever since.

Everybody else around the way heard The Roots too, or The Square Roots as they were calling themselves at the time. They were raw and crude, but in the sense of raw materials and crude oil. Even then, they were that good. Even in those first moments, in those first days, they sounded like the stars they were for the moment pretending to be. Even more, they sounded like Philly. They sounded like the world I knew, a surprisingly sophisticated, urbane, neo-soul black bohemian culture. That Philly could contain such a vibe may not seem like a stretch now, but this was before The Roots changed everything. Jill Scott wasn’t a diva; she was just that cool (and slender) sister who always read the sex poems Friday nights at October Gallery. King Britt was just the DJ who spun at Silk City on Monday nights and worked at Tower Records on the weekdays. I didn’t know Kindred, Bilal, or Musiq Soulchild even existed.

Back on that street corner on, their backpacks still on and actually filled with books they needed for high school, it was clear they were articulating something that hadn’t been heard before. I couldn’t count how many of them were rapping, but I did notice that there was this one little dark-skin cat that consistently rocked it, whom the others returned the mic to like he owned it. I came back a couple of times in the weeks that followed, and they were out there fairly often, rocking that corner like they were paying rent. Their crowds were clearly growing, too. One day not long after the first, there was a rumor in the crowd that someone had hired them to perform at a wedding for three hundred bucks. At the moment, that seemed to me to be such a high level of accomplishment.

Not long after this, I left Philly to go to college out in the Midwest, and when I tried to contact Cricket, their early manager, I found out that the band had left for Germany to record a cd. When I heard that, that seemed like it: if it were possible for any of us from Philly to make it on a national level, it would be The Square Roots. With all of their skills and originality, if they couldn’t make it then none of us could. Their talent was undeniable, so if they were denied we all would be. I included myself in that estimation. The album came back from Europe with them, Organix, with a low budget black cd cover that got passed around thoroughly long before it hit the stores. “On the actual, I swings like I'm Satchel/And brings groovy things to my peoples on the natural,” Tariq wrapped with Amir’s drum snapping behind the words and that was exactly the sound that I heard the first time on Passyunk. They captured it.

But it looked like nobody outside of the black boho scene in Philly really cared. The album got barely any play on Power 99, or the only other black station at the time, WDAS. I heard more cars drive by in Germantown rocking it on their cd players than I did on the radio. So for a while, I thought that was it. Judgment from the universe. Then their deal from DGC Records came through and it looked as if they would get a reprieve from obscurity. This new album actually had a budget behind it. There was this butter Philly jawn I was trying to talk to, and one of our first dates was cancelled because she ended up working till 3am designing the cover for one of first Roots singles, “Proceed.” I was salty, but I was also eager to hear the LP, so I got over it.

In 1994 though, I found myself in London, stuck in a disastrous relationship with a different woman, a relationship that I desperately wanted to work despite all evidence it was rightfully doomed. Emotionally exhausted, disconnected from my own roots and hometown, I managed to get tickets to see The Roots perform in the U.K.’s Camden (very different from Camden, NJ) for a concert put together by Straight No Chaser magazine. As much as I loved London, I had no family in that world, no friends that knew me from back in the day, no real connections, and at this hard time I was feeling the effects of that. I entered that theater a damaged and wounded man, disconnected and reeling. Waiting through the other acts, I stared down at the stage from the balcony until finally they appeared—it was only three years later, and there were those same dudes from the corner, now on the world stage. And for the length of their performance, I was home again. Not just in Philly, but also in a world where I existed and mattered. They actually did the song that my past crush had worked on the LP design for, “Proceed,” and for a moment I felt the strength to do just that. The nightmare relationship I was in took another four months to truly hit the wall, but that breather, that moment to collect myself, helped me gather the strength to make it through that period and get beyond.

Last weekend, I finally watched Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, and saw the guys from The Roots, and Jill, and thought about this. I read a review of Block Party that criticized Chappelle for having such minor acts such as The Roots, Jill Scott, and Erykah Badu instead of Jay-Z, Beyonce, and other A-list black musical guests. I knew immediately that this writer was not a part of our community, nor had any real understanding of it. That is what that movie was about, community. Black artists who do sophisticated work invariably find the majority of their audience to be, as Amir eloquently put it in the film, “People who don’t look like us.” The result of this is that we rarely get to be in environments where we are the majority, where we control the reality, where we are completely at home.

Writing prose is probably the most solitary of artistic endeavors. I create my art alone, and in silence, and my audience receives my art in much the same way. And though I have been successful in my field, mine is a small small audience as well. Writing, unlike comedy or popular music, is not greatly appreciated by this society, regardless of ethnicity. I go on tour every couple of years, meet those few people who come out to say hi, but besides that I have no connections to my audience, and rarely any with most of my literary peers. I have almost no connection with other artists of my caste and age in other mediums either. Along with Vic LaValle, I hung out with Mos Def once—a huge Victor LaValle fan—but that’s about it. Mos is an avid reader, and as such a rarity. I have never hung out with dancers, musicians, visual artists, or comedians of the larger black bohemian world. As a result, the artistic community I belong to is largely in my head, on my laptop, and in my iPod. Both of my novels have been in part about that: creating a community on the page, asserting the boundaries of my internal world. In the creation of my voice, I owe as much to The Roots in their articulation of that Philadelphia reality as I do to many of the literary giants I tried to emulate. That’s true regardless of the fact that no literary critic has ever identified my work as being a part of that Philly neo-soul aesthetic, nor that most of the people who were and are in that world have never read me. Still, “I shall proceed to continue to” write my books. In the hope that someday I too will find my audience out there waiting for me.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com


PS- When Vic asked Mos Def whom his favorite MC was, Mos answered in an instant: “Tariq from The Roots.” In particular, “I'm like Aquaman and Brown Hornet/I'm like Imhotep but don't flaunt it,” is what he quoted, nodding his head in awe.

PS-PS- that "butter Philly jawn" that stood me up to work on The Roots LP and I hooked back up five years later. She said yes when I asked her to marry me. As I write this, our three kids rock to Phrenology.

on The Meaning of Work

The Washington Post has a good series focusing on issues specific to black men. The article linked below goes to the heart of what we have been discussing here, focusing on one young man's struggle to break out of unemployment and poverty. The article itself is well written, balanced and fair.

What I think is interesting about subject Chris Dansby's situation is that it is not only a common one for his caste, but also that his predicament defies the narrow rhetorical solutions trumpeted by many of our ideologues. In reality, there is no one solution for his problems.

If there were more government resources available to him it would benefit Dansby, but it wouldn't completely solve his issues, many of which are internal: part of his problem is that he repeatedly gets demoralized and just stops going to his low paying jobs, therefor he never builds momentum and moves up the ladder.

On the other side, while an increased level of personal responsibility would greatly help him, that wouldn't solve his problems either: he lacks the mobility to drive to better jobs, and the training to get anything beyond entry level employment. Even more devastating is that he lacks an understanding of how work works, that you are supposed to climb yourself up slowly, one job at a time. That you don't quit one job until you have another one, and that you find a way to get the training that will put even more lucrative jobs within reach.

In a stunning bit of dialogue, Dansby reveals that he thinks a GED is enough to guarantee him a higher paying job. This, of course, hasn't been true since the 1950s. But with an absentee father, and a mother who never learned the keys to mobility herself, nobody is around to tell him this basic fact. Danby's knowledge of the way the world works is so inadequate that it seems as if just one day of good instruction would do him a world of difference.

Maybe that's what the black middle-class needs to be doing, going back into poor black areas on a regularly basis and sharing the personal information we have on social mobility. Not hollow "You are somebody!" slogans, or "You came from kings!" history lessons, or even vague "Stay in school! Go to college!" directions either, but very pragmatic, nuts and bolts instructions for gaining access to the middle-class dream.

Read the article and try this: based on what you learn of him in the piece, how would you counsel Chris Dansby on entering into the middle-class before he's thirty? Or do you think that that goal is impossible for him?

The Meaning of Work

News from Manhattan

I went into NYC today. Back in the day, going to Manhattan seemed such a big deal to me. There was so much to discover there: music, food, clothes, magazines, books. So many things you couldn't find anywhere else. I remember I used to see King Britt at Market East taking the R7 train from Philly up to New York to shop for clothes and records; this was back when we were both in our teens. King was always a cool dude, but the fact that he would go up on his lonesome to the big city just blew me away.

Now, with the internet and the rise of the big boxes, it's not like that anymore. While the rural areas are suddenly more livible, the downside is that our cities have lost their monopoly on the world's treasures. Walking around town, I was struck by that, depressed by it too. But then I remembered one thing they have that you can't find anywhere else: all those people. Where else can you walk around and watch so many different kinds of human beings? When I figured that out, it put me back.

The reason for my trip was largely to meet with the publicity folks at Bloomsbury to discuss their promotional plan for Great Negro Plot. To be honest, I was surprised that there was one: I was expecting them to just flick it out there and see if it floats. I was pleasantly surprised that they were investing more than that. They even had a galley made up of the thing, much to my surprise. (A galley is a soft cover version of the uncorrected manuscript printed cheaply for the purpose of print reviews, bookstore buyer sales and blurbs.) I don't know why all this should surprise me, but it did.

I sold my first novel to Bloomsbury eight years ago. I remember walking to their office in the Flat Iron Building, elated because it seemed my dreams were about to come true. That it was in this historic NYC landmark just made my years of New York starvation more poetic. When I arrived at the actual office, I found it to be a dirty-ass, dusty mess that looked like it had been empty for years. The main room had some Apple IIe computers forgotten in one corner and a dead hibiscus plant in the other.

For a second, I thought it was a scam. But Karen Rinaldi, the editor, was real, and she liked the same things about Drop that I did, so I went with her. Later that week, there was a generous offer from another house for $15,000 more, but I had a good feeling about this upstart British press built on Harry Potter money, so I gave my book to Karen and the two other employees that comprised Bloomsbury USA.

Today, the Bloomsbury I visited takes up three floors in the building and has 80 employees. And me? I've sold at least 80 books. Thank god they don't ask for the advance money back.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

How to Pitch a Graphic Novel: The Incognegro Story

Vertigo Comics, the mature audience house at DC Comics, will be publishing my creator-owned original graphic novel in February 2008. In response to those who have asked how the hell something like that happens, I offer the following.

Growing up as mulatto pups, my cousin Ben and I used to joke about those other mixed breeds who would pretend to be white or, as we named it, went incognegro. Apparently (I just found this out), Ludacris had an album of the same title, but for the record I was using this word long before that, and budding etymologists may search for an article on “passing” I did for Time Out-New York that I’m pretty sure pre-dates the rapper’s usage. And I doubt I was the first to use the word (nor my cousin Ben).

Anyway, as an appropriately poor selling mid-list author, I often joke that all I would have to do to have a bestseller would be to write a commercial suspense book called Incognegro. Given the press’s desire to make the personal history of the artist and art the same thing, it was sure to be a hit. But it would have been a shitty, cynical book, so I wasn’t interested.

Fast forward. I started doing work with Vertigo, specifically on a Hellblazer mini-series that was a bit of fun. After that, I started looking at the idea of doing more. The graphic novels gave me the opportunity to write exciting, plot-driven pieces while not betraying the type of poetic, character-driven prose I enjoy. Many literary writers have written scripts for movies (really, really shitty movies too), the only difference here was that my script would be drawn instead of shot.

Sure, there would be those who’s pretensions would lead them to condemn me for doing any form of commercial work, but I wanted to do it anyway. If anything, doing genre-influenced scripts on the graphic side has inspired me to push the creative boundaries of prose further to the edge. Today, I have no expectation of money or readership for my novels at this point. Believe it or not, that’s a good thing. It means I get tell the truth, and not have to worry if anybody wants to hear it. (I say this now, but if I don’t get a million dollars and readers for my next novel, Pym, somebody’s getting shot.)

So I gave Vertigo this pitch. It’s short, but based on just these words, I sold them the idea and movie rights. I wrote the whole thing while living in Philly for the summer, and now it’s being drawn by Warren Pleece. I’m looking forward to seeing it, and I hope to put some sample images here over the next few months.

The Incognegro Pitch