On being an Editor
It must be a form of cosmic retribution—or what the ill-informed call “karma”—or what the sage denizens of my neighborhood mean when they say (in that accent I know and love so well), “what goes around, comes around”—that I am now an Editor. If there is an Anthropomorphic Deity with a Hand on the Helm, I know that Entity is laughing His/Her/Its ambrosial buttock(s) off. Fate is not just malevolent, it’s mischievous. The Universe has a sense of humor, and it’s killing me.
I’ve been in some sort of print since the age of 14. As such, I thought I was brilliant even when I was not. I thought my jokes were riotous and my sentences were pearls of literary eloquence. So when my work was altered in any way by a mere editor, I threw a fit. Actually, let’s just call it by its real name: a tantrum.
In the late 1970s, my father published a local TV listings weekly and found room to include some of my youthful scrawls. I should have been grateful—and I generally was, except one time when he was struggling to meet a printer’s deadline and I had seen how he re-wrote something I gave him. It was no longer my “wonderful” writing. I shudder now to think that I crumpled up the copy and threw it on the floor. If I could go back in time right now, I’d slap myself in the face. I’d also say, “At 15, your jokes are nowhere damn near as funny as yo
