"You're a writer?" the man said. "Hey, I've got a great idea for a book."
Gompers tried to stay calm. He had become a writer for the same reason anybody did: he was incapable of coming up with ideas of his own, and he longed for a lifetime of being given them at cocktail parties. But he had been down this road before. Somebody would offer him an amazing, can't-fail idea for a guaranteed best-seller that was certain to be made into a hit movie, and then they would demand millions of dollars in payment.
This was fair enough, but Gompers simply didn't have the money. How could he, a mere writer, earn any money before he had an idea given to him by a total stranger? And without any money, how could he pay the millions of dollars the idea was inevitably worth? It was, in the phrase coined by Joseph Heller's chiropractor's cousin, a total "Catch-22."
So Gompers tried to play it cool. "A great idea?" he said, casually. "And what would you want in return?"
"You write the book, and then I take half the profits," the man answered.
Gompers nearly dropped his drink. The other man was going to do the heavy lifting of coming up with a one- or two-sentence logline, and all Gompers had to do was expand it into a novel-length story featuring believable characters and elegant prose—and, in exchange, the man wanted only half the profits?
There had to be a catch. Maybe the idea _wasn't _for a guaranteed best-seller that was certain to become a hit movie. Maybe it only had a seventy-five-per-cent chance of becoming a best-seller, and then the film version would earn a few Oscars in technical categories but never really take off. Still, if he turned it down and the man later ended up at a cocktail party with John Grisham or Thomas Pynchon, Gompers would never forgive himself.
"It's a deal," Gompers said. "Lay it on me."
"My idea," the man said, savoring the moment, knowing that he was about to change Gompers's life forever, "is for a book about a specialist in adult orthodontics . . . who solves crimes."
The room started to spin. Gompers's knees went weak. This is it, he thought. This is the big one_._ It finally happened to me. Books about orthodontics had dominated the best-seller lists for decades, but nobody had ever thought of doing one about adult orthodontics, let alone one where somebody solved a crime.
Then his excitement drained away, and cold, cruel reality hit him. "The problem is," Gompers said, "a book like that is going to live or die on authenticity. It couldn't possibly work without two or even three brief orthodontic anecdotes. And where am I going to get those?"
The other man must have been waiting for exactly that question, because it was with an air of tremendous satisfaction that he nodded and tapped his own chest. "I'm an orthodontist. And guess what my specialty is?"
Were there angels singing, or was it just Gompers's imagination?
Either way, he didn't waste another second. He pulled out the cracked and faded contract he'd kept in his wallet for so many hopeful decades. "Sign here," he told the man, "on the line that says 'Guy Who Has Idea for a Guaranteed Best-seller.' "
A thought occurred to Gompers. Maybe he could make two of his dreams come true at once.
"You probably get this all the time," he said to the other man. "But I have this idea for an adult-orthodontic appliance . . ."
