There was a point, many years into this profession, when I had become fairly convinced that I would die in front of my computer: that as a young man, I would feel that bolt of numbness in my fingertips, I would clutch my chest and gnash my teeth, and they would find me mashed facedown into my keyboard, my last recorded words on earth something like “asdklihujjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjdddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd.”
But as my aspiration to be done with the profession grew stronger, so too did my work ethic and my resolve to make it pay. I do not exaggerate in the least when I tell you that I was reaching a breaking point and verging on a moment of physical collapse. I really and truly thought I might stroke out and go all droopy on my desk.
But I was past burning out. I had outgrown it. Bree would glance into my office worriedly. She had known me forever, but she was only now coming to understand how constantly I felt I had to work for survival. And now I actually had a motive for survival, which was a new feeling.
There was only one way to make this job work, though. When it came time for finals, I was prepared to descend the seven circles of hell without flinching. In the springtime, fresh assignments crowded each other out for attention on the writers’ board, leaving the more complex and time-consuming works twisting in the wind. I gobbled up assignments about the U.S. Constitution, the French Revolution, the Cold War, abortion, nursing leadership, global warming, affirmative action, business ethics, and The Great Gatsby. On any one of those subjects, I pretty much wrote the same paper twenty or thirty times a year with modest variations and recycled sources. Now was when I really got cranking.
An abortion paper of about eight pages in length would pay between $96 and $120 during seasons of heavy demand. That may not sound like a lot, but I could turn this assignment out in two hours flat. And I could do that all day long, and well into the evening hours, too. And it wasn’t that difficult.
But natural market demands always had a different plan. Let’s say that a customer needed a twenty-page comparative essay on public equity investment in China versus India and that it was due in six days. And let’s say the paper was posted on the writers’ board at a rate of $220. Nobody would touch it for days. Particularly if the three pages of directions requesting the use of specific sources, outlining a format, and calling for the delineation of numerous international trade agreements suggested that this assignment would take something like seven or eight hours. At $220, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole during busy season. Remember, I could make that writing two abortion papers over the course of four hours.
The assignment would continue to hang out on the board while papers about Freud and Faulkner flew off the racks. Then suddenly, desperation would set in, and the customer would contact our service department.
“Why isn’t anybody taking my paper?” he would ask.
“This is a very busy time of year, and most of our writers carry extremely full schedules. Perhaps if you raised your offer, one of our writers would be in a better position to take on your work,” the customer service rep would say.
Bingo, bango, $300 for the paper about equity in India and China. I’d be all in. I would grab up the paper, and it would go on top of the huge, miserable pile of shit that I had to shovel through. Looking at my schedule now, with this twenty-page bastard stuffed right in the middle, I wouldn’t see a day when I could sleep for more than three hours coming for at least a week. As soon as I finished one paper, I started another. As soon as I submitted an assignment, I went to the writers’ board and picked up another one to take its place. This was standard operating procedure. In the midst of such stretches, even the sleep that I did get was riddled with tension. Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines. Always on the clock. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick…
During finals, I would have two recurring dreams, sometimes interwoven with each other. In one, I was driving along the New Jersey Turnpike and struggling to keep my eyes open. Then I couldn’t fight the sensation any longer, and I was sleeping behind the wheel. I would wake up suddenly, expecting my bed to veer off into a guardrail.
In the other dream, I could see myself in bed sleeping through a deadline. I could see the clock flashing nine a.m. even though it was still pitch-dark outside. I could feel those jerky little e-mails from the customer: “I’m wating.” “What happens to my papper. It was suppose to be for today.” “Hurry with the paper please. I’m running out of tim.”
Shit. This job was making me dream in developmental delay.
And I was getting night sweats. I would get up in the middle of the night and get a towel to sleep on. I would soak through that. I was constantly awake, even when I was sleeping, fully aware of myself, my restlessness, and the deadlines on my head. I was drowning in pools of perspiration, the sheets were getting drenched, and Bree was having dreams about fishing and water parks.
It was the early spring of 2009, and I was at both the height of my exhaustion and the peak of my powers, when I took on my biggest assignment ever, a 160-page paper about international financial reporting standards. Posted to the board at an initial rate of sixteen hundred dollars, it went untouched. Eventually, the motivated buyer called customer service in desperation. The paper got bumped to two thousand bucks. Say what you want about the rate and the obvious horribleness of the assignment. It would be the biggest commission I’d ever had. The assignment was due in two months, and knowing myself as I did, I suspected that if I accepted it, I wouldn’t even think about starting it until the week of the deadline.
My schedule was full but manageable in early March. By the paper’s May deadline, I would envy the dead their rest. My finger hovered over the “Write It” button for a good two minutes while I tried to talk myself out of this thing. This paper will be the end of you, I told me.
Nuts to that, I figured. I had to know if I could pull it off. At this point in my career, I was working aggressively to find my own limits. Where was the line of exhaustion past which I could not go? What was the threshold of boredom beyond which my attention span could not be even partially sustained?
Somehow, these questions were more compelling to me than the fact that the bags under my eyes looked like silver dollars or the fact that I might forget to consume anything but coffee or weed until six p.m. on any given day. The only way to stay on top of a lifetime of deadlines is to be utterly compulsive and neurotic.
But not about time management. As I think we’ve established, I suck quite a bit at that. And not about work-flow organization. Organization has never been my strong suit. But one must be utterly compulsive and neurotic about one’s isolation, one’s focus, and one’s stamina. Work must not be interrupted by more than a bathroom break or a hot shower, which I substituted for sleep and exercise.
Initially, I put the gigantic paper aside and sort of secretly feared it as I worked on other stuff. As the deadline approached, I stopped taking on new assignments. I began clearing my schedule, putting aside just enough time to write a shitty book in less than seven days. Technically, I only left myself four days before the deadline. But I figured I could allow myself the cushion of an extra day based on the assumption that the client didn’t plan on handing in this monstrosity the day he received it.
When the week of the beast began, I got myself a good night’s sleep, woke up at nine a.m., and dove in headfirst.
It’s always slow going at the start of something big. The best thing you can do with something this terrifying is break it up into a whole bunch of little pieces. I referred to the customer’s instructions:
This is a doctoral level presentation. Since I have no official dissertation proposal apart from the above heading, and I am not fully aware of the exact structure and required elements of such paper, I have briefly derived unsystematically what I think should be covered by my Doctoral Dissertation, based on talks with my professor…
Not a lot of help there. I shit you not, this customer paid four thousand bucks (two grand to me, two grand to my employers) for a doctoral dissertation and provided me with one page of instructions. It was like buying a used car based on the specifications that it had four wheels and was blue. The customer never followed up on his order with source specifications, never checked in to find out what the primary argument of his dissertation would be, and never suggested that he had any particularly strong opinions about the work upon which his doctoral degree would be based. Don’t ask me how this is possible. It’s not my job to know.
In any event, once I took on the assignment, I was pretty much on my own.
So how I wrote 160 pages in five days is a story of intense, soul-crushing solitude; a haze of facts and fabrications; a foot-dragging trudge to a blurry light at the end of a long, dark chunnel. As Laotzu tells, the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. This describes every beast I’ve ever written. As I write the first sentence on a blank page, I remind myself that I have often been at the beginning and I have always made it to the end. This beast would be no different.
Still, it takes some effort to become ensconced in something that will own you for the next several days. And I have about as much personal interest in international accounting standards as I have in being shot in the face. So I started googling and reading. The paper called for fifty sources, so I really couldn’t get too caught up in reading any one thing.
You do get caught up in the subject matter from time to time. I once had to write a paper debunking the Bush administration’s version of events leading up to and following 9/11. The information was so readily available, disturbing, and fascinating that I spent all day reading. It took me twelve hours to write a ten-page paper. Another time I had to write a paper on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and it hit me that I hadn’t read the great American novel, what with it having been banned in my high school.
So I began reading. After an hour had passed, I realized that my deadline was approaching and I hadn’t written a word. I put the book down and flashed out a three-pager about American culture and the romanticizing of individual freedoms. This took me about thirty minutes, made me thirty bucks, and allowed me to get back to the book. I spent the rest of the day reading instead of working.
I didn’t have this sort of distraction when reading about international financial reporting standards. I would generally read a source long enough to discover a sentence or paragraph that I understood. I’m a pretty perceptive reader, but this was a complex, esoteric subject, and you couldn’t just learn it in an afternoon of roughshod skimming. I knew I had to be efficient, smart, and productive—160 pages in five days.
I developed a thesis posing an argument that global convergence to international standards would bring greater accountability for some nations but would impose great economic hardship on developing nations already struggling to adapt to the inherent inequalities in the global economy. I didn’t know if this was true, in the dictionary sense of the word. It sounded true. Based on many of the sources that I had located, it seemed like a plausible argument. Whatever it was, I was going to write a gajillion words on why it was so fucking true that I had to write a whole dissertation on it. Every sentence that I pulled from every source would be placed in quotes and given an overly long, overly wordy explanation clarifying why the thing I had just written above was true and really important.
On the first day, I was easily distracted but energetic. I made my coffee, lit a stick of incense, and put on some Dave Brubeck. I opened my window a crack and let in the sweet, dewy smell of morning. I live directly across the street from an Oyster House, so later in the day it would smell of fried fish for hours. But right then, it just smelled like morning. In quiet moments like this, I actually loved my job.
The sound of people making their commute outside while I sat barefoot at my desk, the thick aromas of coffee and weed swirling around above my head, the elegant alto sax of Paul Desmond lilting through my speakers, the cursor blinking on an empty page in front of me. This was the kind of picturesque academic moment that made me inhale with vitality and exhale with a sense of contentment.
It was also the kind of environment where you sat and did nothing for a whole day. You could look up baseball stats, you could illegally download music, you could browse Internet porn, you could IM with friends who hated their jobs and did nothing but “lol” and “brb” all day long. This was usually how I spent the first day of any big project. I’d procrastinate magnificently for hours, then reward myself prematurely for finishing a few pages. After three or four pages, I’d stand up and wander around my office, playing with toys or watching old ball games on the MLB Network. God forbid I should come across reruns of Sanford and Son, because I swear to crap, I’d get nothing done.
Three p.m. and I’d written just under 7 pages. I sucked.
I was pretty unhappy with myself. I like sleeping late, so it’s officially a waste of a morning if I’ve gotten up before I want to and still haven’t managed to get my ass in gear. Most nights, the Phillies play at seven p.m., at which point my productivity goes out the window. Friends tend to drop by for most games. At 162 a year, this is quite a commitment, and is in a category of things that I will allow to supersede my work, joined only by Bree and my personal hygiene.
The thought of a baseball game just a few hours away filled me with joy and focus. I started to connect with the topic. There’s always that moment during a long process like this, when something clicks and I begin to understand more fully what I’m writing about. I’ll read a sentence that articulates perfectly what I need to understand in order to do the bare minimum, which was admittedly a lot in this case. I found that sentence in the late afternoon of Day 1. By the first pitch of the Phillies game that night, I had pages. I felt OK about that. Not great but OK. I kicked off early. Only 138 pages to go.
Day 2 was fantastic. I woke up at seven a.m. and felt a rush of clarity. I was getting it, and I was cranking. I was feeling upbeat, and as I eased my way into it, I put on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It has the sweeping grandness of a sunrise over the city skyline, and it makes me feel purposive, like somebody with a briefcase or a guy in a commercial about business-class air travel.
I pulled up all the shades, and spring gushed into my room. I was a young man in my prime. Nothing better than that. This was how I felt on my good days. I felt a genuine strength coursing through my wrists, disobeying the carpal tunnel stiffness and bouncing sprightly out of my fingertips. It would be a stretch to say that I was enjoying my paper on accounting, but I was feeling pretty good about my grip on it. The literature made sense, the facts were coming together, and the structure of the dissertation was laid out across a dozen separate Microsoft Word files.
My MacBook allows me to divide my screen into six separate desktop spaces. It’s like being able to spin around in your chair and work on six different monitors at once. I dipped in and out of them like an octopus, plugging in a page or two for the literature review, than grabbing a source from an old paper on international trade agreements and inserting it into the background section, then taking a break from these to write an abstract. At one time, I might have had twenty files open at once and four different Web browser windows going, each with five to ten tabs open.
And of course I was running iTunes. I was no longer trying to concentrate. Now I was power-flowing. I was sprinting. I was running the decathlon. It was all coming with great ease now. I was listening to the Clash and Talking Heads and the Ramones. I had written 20 pages by the time that evening’s Phillies game was about to begin.
Still, I rewarded myself for a productive day by getting lazy. I did basically nothing during the game. I got out maybe four pages in three hours. Suddenly, it was ten thirty, and I was just a shade more than halfway to where I wanted to be before I went to sleep. The day suddenly caught up with me all at once. Bree was getting ready for bed. She’d be working a double starting in the morning.
Me, I was getting ready for my third shift of the day. Kraftwerk’s Autobahn took me into the late-night hours. It’s the musical rendering of a fast drive on a neon highway. The glow from my computer screen made my eyes feel like I’d been in chlorinated water all day. They were burning and watering. The pace that I’d enjoyed for most of the day was no longer possible. I stopped after every sentence, my wrists pressing into the keyboard like paperweights. I squeezed out another drop of words… then stopped… then a few more… then stopped.
Then I stopped looking at the clock. I stopped looking at the page count. I determined simply to write until I could no longer make sense of my surroundings.
When I heard the tailgate of the beer delivery truck clatter open at the Oyster House, I realized the sun was rising. I had written another 26 pages. I got into bed at seven a.m. with only 92 pages to go.
My alarm was set for nine a.m., but I snoozed until about nine fifteen. That extra fifteen minutes toyed with me. I blinked and it was gone. I pulled myself out of bed and sighed. I had nothing to look forward to that day. No sleep. No warmth. No sunshine. No time for love, Dr. Jones.
It was just me and the beast. And on that third day, I was just starting to feel off. I don’t know. Maybe it was the two hours of sleep. Perhaps it was the knowledge that I had to go through this day, the day after that, and some portion of the next day too before I could be a human being again. It’s conceivable that I was falling out of love with the subject matter. It was an absolute battle to get through the morning. My body ignored the coffee. It felt like I had hot sauce on my eyelids. I spent the first half of the day on 10 pages.
By about two p.m., I was doing everything in my power to get back into it. This was no time to puss out. I put on Fun House by the Stooges. Iggy Pop used to pull his pants off and cut himself with broken bottles onstage. I kind of thought of him as a role model. I stood up and jumped around the house. I stretched and jogged in place and shouted profanities at the mirror. I sat back down coursing with adrenaline.
I wrote one sentence about how the plan for the U.S. GAAP to ultimately converge with the IFRS is complicated by the implications of the PCAOB and blah blah blah bling blar blar blar. By the time I got to the end of it, I was all out of piss all over again. I was running out of gas right in the middle of the race. I was going to need some help for this one.
I called my buddy Doc, who showed up in less than an hour.
“So, how’s it going?” Doc asked.
“Ohhh, super,” I said with the inflection of a dead man.
“Yeah?”
“Oh yeah. Totally. It’s an emotional roller coaster. It’s the feel-good paper of the year.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I want to kill myself, but in a way that’s much faster than the way I’m currently doing it.”
“Catch the Phils game last night?” “Um. I think so. Was that the game where all the players melted into a single swirling ball of psychedelic fractals during the seventh-inning stretch?”
“Dude, maybe you should get some sleep.”
“Nah, it’s just there’s so many games a year, they all sort of blend together.”
Doc cut a few bumps of cocaine, and we blew them off the back of my American Heritage Dictionary.
“Wooohoo,” I said. “This oughta help.”
The coke rushed through my head, and my eyes were like tractor wheels. Doc left me with a gram and went on his way. I immediately cut another couple of lines for myself. I vacuumed them up and put on the Mahavishnu Orchestra. The fusion jazz combo is the height of anxiety. It’s heavy, brooding, and hot. It gives me the jimmy leg. So I started bouncing and trembling and typing. And for a series of forty-minute bursts, I was unstoppable.
But the party ended every hour, so I had to keep ringing the bell. I’m listening to Captain Beefheart and Wu-Tang, and I’m totally relating. Hut one, hut two, hut three, hut! Ol’ Dirty Bastard live and uncut! I am the Dirt Dog.
By four a.m., I’d had another 40-page day. I had no sensation in the tip of my nose, my teeth felt like they could fall out of my head, and my eyes looked deranged. I’d been running my hands furiously through my hair. I looked like the guy from A Flock of Seagulls if he’d gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.
Fifty-two pages to go. You would have to have gone through those last three days just to know how good that actually sounded to me. I got into bed at four thirty, gnashed my teeth, and stared at the ceiling until six a.m. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was awake.
I woke up at ten a.m., furious with myself for oversleeping. I took my shower and washed the dried blood from my nose. I skipped my coffee and went straight to the coke. If this was to be a bender, there was no point in pussyfooting around it. The greatest influence on my writing at this time was probably Chris Farley’s E! True Hollywood Story.
And like that, I was back into it.
The deadline was ten that night, and as I had presumed right from the start, there was no earthly way I was making it. But I hadn’t heard a word from this guy in months, so I wasn’t too worried that he was watching the clock. My expectation was something more like the next morning, though it would all be like one big fat day for me. There would be no friends today, no fraternizing with my lady, no food, no Phillies game. I could do nothing to keep my mind from straying every fifth sentence. I was chewing on my molars and knuckling my temples, trying to force my head to find a new way to say the things I’d already said, trying to find a new avenue down which to spray my bullshit, trying to kick-start my rusted engine.
At this point, every splash of water on the face, every three-minute stretching break, every new album, every hit of weed, and every line of coke, it was all part of this never-ending struggle to trick myself into being awake. Like when your remote is dead, you know you can always open it up and flip the batteries. It tricks the remote into a few more channel changes. By midnight, my head felt like a construction site. Things were clanging and crashing, whistling and buzzing, building and breaking. I was cracked the fuck out. I felt like a really geeky version of Scarface, or at least the nerd Scarface would have gotten to do his homework. But, I was at the 140-page mark. If I, too, was to die in a hail of bullets over a bag of cocaine, let it not be said that I did not understand the basic principles of international accounting standards.
The realization that I was this close… that did bring me some real energy.
So I dropped the hammer down and did me some wordsmithing. When I’m motivated by the thought of being done, I’m like Eddie Van Halen. I just start riffing all up and down the place, playing fast, shredding loudly, never stopping to reflect. Spitting out a blazing chord progression as the next one formulates in my head. There was no way to know whether the words I was writing made any sense. It didn’t matter anymore.
And in the end, when it was done, instead of relief, I felt like I had malaria. I couldn’t even go to sleep. For about a day, I had post-traumatic stress disorder. You’d think that once you got home from the war, you’d be all “Hooray for my bed. Hooray for my refrigerator. Hooray for my TV.” But no, it’s not like that. Not after the things I’ve seen, man.
That whole next day was spent trying to reaffirm my connections to humanity, apologizing profusely to Bree for going on a secret cocaine bender, regenerating the vast economy of words that I had surrendered to this one project. And then, of course, writing a five-page paper on the Dutch East India Company and a three pager on apartheid in South Africa. That’s right. It never fucking ends. Even when you’re not in the shit, you’re still at war.
And then, two days later, and for the first time, I heard from my client, who for two months prior to receiving his automobile-priced paper had provided me with no instructions, no specifications, no details, and no interaction.
“Hello, I received a work with you, but this is either the wrong work, or there has been a complete misunderstanding from your side in regard to the topic of the work…”
Son of a bitch.