Damn…We’re Gonna Win This Thing!

As I stared down another self-imposed and perilously close deadline, I couldn’t help but wonder: would this undertaking eventually fall into place? With all the ghosts and magic and twins and flashbacks and fever dreams, would these stories ever effectively tie together? Or should I have let sleeping fishes lie?

I once had a case of writer’s block so bad that I wrote a column about my sock drawer. I was convinced I was going to get fired; even Samantha wasn’t reading my column, and the socio-political aftermath of 9/11 did not render a good economy in which to be whipped cream. I was so desperate, I even agreed to go to a self-help seminar with Charlotte.

“You might get a column out of it,” Charlotte reasoned, catching me in a weak moment.

She and I were sitting at a sidewalk café playing “The 100,” a game where we decided how many men walking past we would sleep with. Charlotte had resoundingly rejected the angry-looking bald guy with a big head walking toward her…but then she realized he was fast approaching our table.

And just like that, my editor Gabe appeared, ex machina, and told me that an editor from Clearwater Press wanted to turn my columns into a book.

Despite passing on the opportunity to hypothetically sleep with Gabe, Charlotte was extremely offended when he brushed her off as I introduced them. Charlotte went home in a huff that the angry, balding, big-headed guy was not interested in hypothetically sleeping with her and, being Charlotte, could not leave well enough alone.

So she cyber-stalked him.

Since I work from home, my interaction with my work colleagues is minimal. I write my columns in my apartment and somehow transport them to Gabe at the New York Star office, despite once devoting an entire column to my learning how to use email…in 2001. Gabe and I occasionally take meetings, like the time I left Aidan behind at the Suffern cabin to take the train back into the city, but suffice to say none of my friends had met Gabe before that day with Charlotte.

Perhaps she has better taste than the rest of us, but somehow Charlotte avoided dating any of the guys who would overlap with the New Jersey underworld. Still, she cracked the whole case wide open with her internet sleuthing skills, honed during the hours she spent researching Trey’s impotence online.

“Carrie, he’s a secret agent!” Charlotte cried as she, Anthony, and I shared a well-endowed baguette from Hot Fellas Baked Goods. Charlotte held out a photo she had helpfully printed from the internet. “Look: Agent Dwight Harris of the FBI.”

“More like Agent I-Have-No-Harris,” Anthony shrieked.

Imagine my surprise when the most important man in my life—my editor—turned out to be the key to the whole mafia-Manhattan connection.

Once again, Charlotte was my salvation…and my meal ticket.

“I am going to get so many columns out of this,” I laughed. “Well, that’s just fabulous!”