Mead Medici

It was simple.

“We want to pay you gobs of money,” he said.

This was a curve ball.

Dreams of earning money had died upon declaring myself an English major in college. Upon signing up for Graduate school, I’d resigned myself to living a debt-ridden, monk-like existence.

To supplement my nonexistent income, I’d taken up writing for fishing and hunting magazines.

Wading through the crisp Colorado mountain stream, I pursue the mighty trout with only a rod and my wits.

Crouched behind a duck blind in the dead of winter, I huddle next to my trusty lab, Duncan, scanning the horizon for the next swarm of mallards.

“Hemingwayesque,” he called it.

I’m not an outdoorsman. I’m an indoorsman. Animals tend to bite me.

“Go on.” I said.
Simply put, they were going to pay me gobs of money to write. Hunting, fishing, boxing, bull fighting, whatever. As long as it involved sweat, death, and manliness, I could pick the topic. I’d be set up in a nice place of my choice with a lavish expense account, a personal cook—no distractions to keep me from writing. The down side? I’d have to shift my dust jacket image—no more rock concert t’s and Elvis Costello glasses. I’d have to grow a beard, wear more flannel, maybe take up pipe smoking and actually get a dog (Whether I named it Duncan or not was up to me, but I was told that Bitsy and Tinkerbell were out.) That, and I had to start punctuating the end of my paragraphs with “Crisp Mountain Beer” instead of periods.

It didn’t always have to be Crisp Mountain Beer, specifically. He represented a specialty publishing house, Stout Stories, which represented a number of horizontally and vertically integrated conglomerates—I could choose from any number of brands and products, mostly booze and other vice products. After a long day on the water, alone in my dinghy, I could stare across the motionless lake, warming my cockles with glass of Oakhouse whisky, aged 18 years. I could also exhale thick plumes of smoke after lighting up a Buchanan Gold cigar—it was up to me.

They were, as he put it, the future of advertising. “With Tivo, Netflix and the internet, product placement is the last bastion of advertising,” he told me.

I was confused—from what I’d understood, I’d chosen an anachronistic medium still available, save for stone tablets. —

“Yes,” he said, “Print is on the way out. However, the few people who still manage to pick up a book are what we in the advertising community like to call ‘Alpha Consumers.’ Higher education, interest in luxury goods, more money to burn.”

“So if regular consumers are canned sardines, getting an Alpha is like landing a Dorado?”

He beamed at my fishing metaphor.

“Exactly. I knew you were right for this.”

I envisioned the future me on the back of a hardcover—patchy beard, red face, overheated from the flannel, eyes watery due to pipe smoke and Duncan’s dander.

“I’m worried about this impacting my standing as a writer.”

“You’re worried that people will actually read your work?”

“No…”

“Because they will. Every author we’ve ever backed has made the best seller list.”

“Really?”

“Really. This isn’t bloated Orson Welles selling jug wine. This is classy. This is subtle. We see your talent. We want to encourage it, fertilize it, let it grow. We just want to grow with you. You get to give the world your message—so do we. It’s a win-win.”

We both knew what I was really worried about—being seen as a sell out. He assured me that all my checks would be from Stout Publishing, and that no one would ever know about our arrangement—it wouldn’t appear to be advertising, just preferences, color, flavor.

The beard came in better than I’d expected, and I really only had to wear the flannel for photo shoots. Though I’m not a fan of the cigars, I’ve found I’m a huge fan of Finnigan Scotch, and a few of Winemar Vineyard’s cabernets.

Though I have to keep him in the backyard of my Spanish style villa due to allergies, I did buy a dog.

He’s with me on the back of my first book, the New York Times best seller “The Mountain and the Sun,” about a man low on water, losing himself in the heat and the hunt. He’s low on water, but he packed plenty of cigars and scotch.

The dog in the photo is a black lab.

I named him Orson.