Everything Hurts

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Let's get something straight. Phil Camp had not set out to become a fraud, or, as it turned out, to prevent himself from perpetuating the fraud that he had become. That's just what happened.

Huh?

Man writes book to pay off ex-wife. Book is supposed to be a spoof. World takes book seriously. Man's life changes. Man under whose name book was written, his life changes as well. Ex-wife paid off, but pissed.

A week shy of nine years and seven months ago, on August 10, 1994, Phil was standing at the bottom of Terminal A at Newark Airport, filling out a lost luggage form. He had been on the road for two weeks with the Mets, then Yankees, then Mets and, at thirty-six, was pretty sure he was about to become temporarily obsolete. After two years of inert negotiations between players and owners, Major League Baseball was seven days from its final drop-dead work stoppage date, with little chance of resuming play before next season. As the shell-shocked maintenance worker who walked around the athletic fields at Phil's college used to say, "No game. Go home."

And if Phil's financially bulimic employer, Excelsior Publications, had its way, stay home. For the last six months, Excelsior had been circling his desk, dropping subtlety-filleted reminders that he'd better grab the twelve-weeks-with-pay/six-months-medical-buyout package the newspaper was offering before it was snapped up by someone with less of a past and more of a future.

Phil made it until the Tuesday after Labor Day before he took the buyout. But it had been the kind of coincidence-laden three weeks that happen to other people. Two days after he got home, he did ten minutes on some syndicated radio show called Bob and Tom and talked about everything other than baseball, prompting the kind of big, raucous laughs from the hosts they normally bestowed on C-list celebrities. The day after that, some guy who called himself a "book packager," Wayne Beiliner, called and said, "If you ever have an idea for a funny book, call me." The day after that, Continental called and asked if he'd be interested in hearing about his baggage. "I know all about my baggage," said Phil, "but I'm interested in hearing about my luggage." Ten yellow legal pad pages after that, he phoned Wayne Beiliner. "I think I may have something," he said.

When Phil told Wayne Beiliner the title, Where Can I Stow My Baggage? the book packager shrieked, "You just made five thousand dollars, pal!" By the time Wayne Beiliner finished reading the ten pages of notes, Phil had made another five thousand dollars.

"How long will it take you to write fifty thousand words?"

Phil's head did the math. His one-thousand-word baseball stories took about an hour. Fifty hours. Forty-hour workweek, but no need to bust his ass....

"Three weeks."

"Take two months," said Wayne Beiliner. "I have to sell this, then get an illustrator."

"You think you can sell this book in two months?"

The book packager packaged a good laugh. "No, pal," he said, "getting the illustrator takes two months. I'll have this sold by Monday."

That Tuesday, the ten-thousand-dollar check arrived by FedEx. It sublet Phil's checking account for the five business days needed for clearing. In that time, he managed two phone calls to his exwife, the former Trish Lamphiere, then Trish Camp, now Trish Lamphiere, that were about as civil as the green room at Jerry Springer. The transcript from the first call still survives:

trish: Hello?

phil: Hi, Trish. It's Phil.

trish: Yeah, what?

phil: I got laid off at the paper.

trish: Great.

phil: But I have a proposition.

trish: Okay, let me sit down. Now, it's going to sound like I'm hanging up, but I'm really just pulling up a chair. (SFX: Click, followed by dial tone.)

The second call went to completion. He offered Trish a one-time buyout of ten thousand dollars rather than pay the last twelve months of an alimony agreement. It turned out to be a savings of two grand for him.

"Fine," she had supposedly said, "and sorry about hanging up."

"No problem."

"You're the only one who makes me act like that."

"Yeah," said Phil. "I know."

Their marriage had lasted three years, which apparently is as long as it takes to convince the average woman that you're not kidding when you say you don't want kids. Phil never imagined he would have to bother getting persuasive, because during their four-year courtship, he and Trish had often supped on the shared belief that families were other people's migraine.

But somewhere in between dancing with her little cousin at their wedding reception and unwrapping the fifth Panasonic bread maker, all of that changed for Trish. Throughout the first two years of the marriage, whenever the subject would come up, Phil would

say, "Please don't ask me to have children," as if he contained both sets of reproductive organs. Trish laughed, and figured him to be merely gun-shy, and mostly ironic. No otherwise kind man would deprive his wife of such joy, would he? Especially one who often told and retold such vivid stories of his parents' rearing of him and his older brother. Painfully hilarious tales of survival of the fits and starts, but mostly fits. And unexaggerated. The older brother, Jimmy, would stop rolling on the couch to weepingly corroborate every episode. Jimmy, who had two girls and a boy of his own and regretted none. So why not? If Phil could recall and regale and laugh along, why not take a shot at a scarless version of upbringing?

He couldn't have meant it. How can a man say something like Please don't ask me to have children and mean it? But he did.

In the end, Year Three, when he was exhausted by the topic, Phil would quote lines from two then-recent movies: (1) "I don't believe in childhood," (Nuts, 1987), and (2) "My sister loved New York City because it had nothing to do with her childhood," (The Prince of Tides, 1991), which would be followed by Trish saying, "It takes a real deep thinker to have Barbra Streisand as the principal architect of his philosophy," and then SFX: Door slam.

Trish was hardly the average woman, clicks and door slams aside. Until her monumental misjudging of Phil's feelings about raising a family, she had made one mistake in her previous forty-three years, an eight-month marriage when she was twenty. The only daughter of Patrick Lamphiere, the liquor store baron of Rumson, Fair Haven, and points south on the Garden State Parkway, Patricia had spent every day of her life but two bathed in the rarefied heir of someone well aware she is in charge and constantly being pursued. Others might have taken that splendidly dealt hand and wiped out the rest of the table on entitlement alone. But with Trish, the appreciation of her lot made her as magnanimous as she was attractive. The kind of magnanimity that comes with almost never losing.

Almost. Phil and Trish had one session with the couples counselor, who said the only way to resolve an impasse over children was to give in to the partner whose feelings are stronger.

"I'll leave you over this," she said.

And Phil Camp, whose carefree path had been well marked with signs that read give in here, got to hear himself say, "I'll miss you, Trish."

"Maybe we should pick this up next week," the counselor had said when his jaw had finished its descent. It got a nice laugh from both of them.

That was the last laugh for a while. The divorce became final in 1992. The three-year, one-thousand-dollar-a-month alimony was a penance Phil wanted to live with. Resolved guilt. He more than understood that a woman does not get that time back, and a man is not allowed to say, "I can't have children" unless he's broke and sterile. And as long as you are the son-in-law of Patrick Lamphiere, your wife will not be liquor-store barren.

Sad time. No winners. Phil would call his brother and say, "Everyone has their baggage, but this will always be my extra suitcase." And so, he gave birth to his first baggage analogy.

Where Can I Stow My Baggage? could have been called Around the World in 101 Metaphors. Luckily, that wasn't the title, because the fad-buying public doesn't care for literary-device-of-comparison shopping. Phil Camp, who had always wanted to think of himself as an immensely complicated man, found that his pen-to-page concepts were quite simple. His prose was spare and endearing, and all that crap, but more important, it was accessible. Come on. Who couldn't read chapter 1, "What's My Baggage?" or chapter 2, "How Much Baggage Do I Need?" and not relate to the point where they thought they had written the book?

Under each chapter heading came the same subheadings:

Family

Marriage/Relationships

Workplace/School

Secrets/Lies

Archenemies (Shit List)

Potential Enemies (Shit Waiting List)

Apologies Due

Regrets

Expectations

Right Now

The rest of the Contents, laid out in bite-size twelve-page chapters, which borrowed less from the highbrow template of self-helpbooks and more from the browse-worthy tradition of a Sunday supplement, was equally unavoidable.

How Much Baggage Will I Claim?

Does My Baggage Have the Proper Identification?

What Baggage Will I Carry On?

Can I Make My Baggage Fit Over My Head or Under My Seat?

No? Then What Can I Do Without?

Lost Luggage

Matching Luggage

Anything Else to Declare?

The sixty or so illustrations gave the book a good deal more than another dimension. It pushed the page total to 182 and justified the $18.95 cover price. Inked by the talented Jeff Hong (think Bruce McCall before his fee went up), each drawing was realistically peopled by featureless souls with whom a reader could identify but not judge, and propelled by thankfully unsubtle comic imagery the same reader could take or leave, but usually took.

Phil took the entire three months to write Where Can I Stow My Baggage? and half of that time was spent shaking his head and asking himself, "Are people going to get that I'm just trying to be funny?" It was a fair question, because some of the jokes were unmistakably jokes (Of course, if you can make yourself feel better about your family by saying you were switched at birth, go with that...), and some of the flip comments designed to fill a page (Someone once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. And I bet that same guy said that line over and over again, expecting everyone would agree with him...) turned out to be accidentally profound.

The following December 1995, Where Can I Stow My Baggage? wedged itself into the bookstore checkout sightline of the solacestarved, stocking-stuffing consumer literati. The book's publication date was as fortuitous as its placement. Two years after souls had gorged themselves on chicken soup, two years before the same souls would stop sweating the small stuff while wondering who moved their cheese.

"But it was supposed to be a goof!" Phil said when he found out he would be collecting royalties a day after the book went on sale.

"Hey, what can I tell you?" gushed Wayne Beiliner, who had moved from book packager to agent without touching the ground. "You're a big, fat shining star. They can't get enough of Marty Fleck."

Marty Fleck was listed as the author of Where Can I Stow My Baggage? From the beginning, Phil knew he would write the book under another name. That name. Marty Fleck was the shortened version of Marty Fleckman, a less than unknown Houston golf pro who had led the 1967 U.S. Open after three rounds. It was the one joke Phil had kept for himself. During his years as a newspaperman, whenever he was having trouble getting in touch with an athlete, politician, or celebrity, Phil would pose as a publicist, Marty Fleck, and leave his number along with some vague message about a fifty-thousand-dollar personal appearance fee for "just showing up at some kid's bar mitzvah on Long Island and waving out of the limousine window." If whoever was taking the message pressed for more information, Phil would say, "Just have Darryl Strawberry (Senator D'Amato, Glenn Close) call me before three or I call my backup, Dwight Gooden (Governor Cuomo, Kathleen Turner). Look, I gotta go. Salman Rushdie needs a suite upgrade." Or something equally brio-saturated. It would crack up the newsroom or Trish, if she was home. And whoever Phil wanted to reach would always call back. Always before three.

Marty Fleck was playful in a way Phil Camp never was, and mercifully shallow. Phil knew he had at least the inch-deep insight that comes from three decades of therapy. But guess what? Inch-deep is as far as most people want to go. If the explanation a person is most comfortable with turns out to be, "Well, that's the hand I was dealt," why dig when you can pack? And if you pack, pack light. And light was where Marty Fleck came in.

Marty Fleck reduced childhood to "Yes or no: My mother wasn't my type." Answer yes, make some room in your baggage. Answer no, make more room. He could admit to being seduced by a thirty-yearold woman when he was seventeen and two chapters later ("Does My Baggage Have the Proper Identification?") confess to the reader that nothing happened, he'd just been trying to impress you.

There are another 180 pages of examples, some less gimmicky than others, but the upshot of all of it was America had a new prophet. Marty Fleck. The media waffled, one day proclaiming him the new Mark Twain, the next day dubbing him the "Dalai Lame-ah," but it waffled on a daily basis and kept the buzz charged through the holidays and beyond.

Meanwhile, the offers started coming in. TV, radio, appearance fees with real money and no waving out of a limo window. Phil told Wayne Beiliner to turn them all down. And six months later, when Where Can I Stow My Baggage? was still on the bestseller list and M. Scott Peck, the author of The Road Less Traveled and People of the Lie, was going out of his way to call Marty Fleck "irrelevant," the offers had quadrupled. Phil's publisher, Duffy Hill Press, was begging him for a sequel, claiming it was the least he owed them for keeping his real name out of it. Phil made the mistake of saying, "Haven't we all made enough money off this nonsense?" and his editor, Rob Wolfmeyer, laughed and said, "Perfect title for the next book, Marty."

Two nights later, during an opening segment called "New Books," David Letterman turned a mocked-up cover toward the camera and said, "Well, advice-maven Marty Fleck is at it again with his latest offering, Where Do I Stow All These Bags of Cash I Made off This Crap?

By the time the misinterpretation of Where Can I Stow My Baggage? had become the mass interpretation of Where Can I Stow My Baggage? Phil Camp felt he had no choice but to continue hiding behind Marty Fleck, while not completely hiding Marty Fleck. So, a year after hardcover hysteria, he ended up accepting one offer. A twice-weekly syndicated newspaper column for, of all bosses, Excelsior Publications, called "Baggage Handling." The plan was to systematically de-guru Marty Fleck and have him emerge as a man with no answers, a man as confused as the thousands of people who had credited him with compartmentalizing their confusion.

The money from the syndication deal was hardly lucrative. Enough to live comfortably in a one-bedroom in Astoria. But the money that kept rolling in, now almost nine friggin' years later, from Where Can I Stow My Baggage? kept Phil in the enviable sprawling midtown Manhattan three-bedroom. Four bedrooms, if you counted The Pad on the living-room floor. The Pad was Phil's nickname for the 1 1/4-inch-thick, 7-by-5-foot remnant of a wrestling mat on which he now spent most of his waking and unwaking hours, lying on his back, thanks to this limp. This goddamn limp.

Nine months ago, it showed up, unannounced, over the July 4th weekend. Phil was minding his own business and overnight became a forty-six-year-old man with a limp. And not even a good limp. Not even enough to make people feel sorry for him. No, this was the kind of limp that had others feeling sorry for themselves. The "Aw, shit. Now we're definitely going to be late" limp. The "Great. Now I suppose we're only playing nine holes" limp. A limp that favors them.

It was no use talking about the pain now. No use talking about something that was always there, but never in the same place in the same way. A pain as impervious to explanation as it was to medication. Over the counter, behind the counter, under the counter, astride the counter. What was the point of discussing this now? Maybe someday, when he might have an answer when someone asked, "What happened to you?" Why walk hobbled among those who could not understand, least of all him? Why talk hobbled? No game, go home.

The limp had slowed Phil, but not stopped "Baggage Handling." He would stay in and do the column on the pad. The pad (lowercase) was the correct term for the long Ampad yellow legal tablet he used to write his column. The Pad (uppercase) was, well, we've already met The Pad.

The column was now in its eighth year. Eighth Inexplicable Friggin' Year, as Phil would say to himself. From the beginning, "Baggage Handling" had satisfied those Marty Fleck disciples who now at least knew where to find him. Back then, Phil was sure his services would only be required for maybe a year before some other fraud, more interested in craven self-promotion, came along. But he hadn't really been paying attention. Months before his column had started, a legitimately celebrated journalist, Joe Klein, emerged out of the marketing shadows and fessed up that he was indeed "Anonymous," the author of the hugely successful 1996 roman-à-Clinton novel Primary Colors. America's vigorous six-month debate about an author's identity was over. The country immediately returned to its natural literary state, not giving a shit about who should correctly be credited for writing what. This was not the United States of Jeopardy, so, Marty Fleck would be safe. And so would Phil Camp.

The hundred-plus daily papers that still carried his column were never picky about what filled the space as long as Marty Fleck brought customers into the tent. And he did. And he still did, seven-plus years, six hundred-plus installments later. However Phil rambled for the first seven hundred and fifty words mattered little, as long as he saved the last fifty or so to draw a Marty Fleck-type conclusion with the beyond-irony signoff, "Happy Baggage!"

He got more mail now than ever. Eighty percent still began, "Dear Liberal Jew Commie New York Faggot Asshole..." but who read that nonsense? As long as they were reading his nonsense.

As a columnist, Marty Fleck took a half-dozen reportorial forms. He would appoint himself someone's publicist (Saddam Hussein, Charlton Heston, Robert Downey, Jr., Sister Souljah) and try to faux earnestly resurrect careers or reputations. He would answer fake letters from imaginary readers. He would give fake answers to real letters from real readers (mostly culled from the 20 percent that began "Dear Marty..."). He would interview long-dead people from history. And four times a year, when he was under the weather, he would let his wife, Stacey Fleck, write the column and expose him for the less-thaninsightful, flawed handler of baggage that he was.

After Trish, a four-times-a-year wife-in-print was the best Phil could manage. He could have done better. Hell, he was all set to do better. Two years ago, in the winter of 2002, he was about to marry his girlfriend of eighteen months, Amanda Rabinoff. Divorced, Jewish, grown kid out of the house, bright, had her own money, and lower maintenance than a studio in Spanish Harlem. All set. Then, just before the start of the ceremony, somebody called in a bomb scare to Central Synagogue. Five months after 9/11, those kinds of calls still got people's attention. And Amanda Rabinoff -- divorced, Jewish, grown kid out of the house, bright, had her own money, and lower maintenance than a George Foreman Grill -- took it as a sign and never reopened the discussion about rescheduling. Which wasn't the only thing Amanda Rabinoff never reopened to Phil. So, No game, go home. All that because somebody called in a bomb scare.

Yeah, somebody...

As much as he had succeeded with his goal to not perpetuate the fraud he had become by fading quietly into the Marty Fleck column, after the bomb scare and Amanda's adroit evacuation, Phil could not prevent the onslaught of becoming another stereotype: Self-help guy who couldn't help self. Years before the phenomenon of Where Can I Stow My Baggage? and M. Scott Peck calling him "irrelevant," Phil had read a piece on Peck in Rolling Stone. Tremendous. Every time M. Scott Peck did something society might frown upon, he said it was part of his research for an upcoming book. So, lighting up a Marlboro red in a crowded elevator? Research for a book about Americans' attitude toward smokers. Taking some eyelash-fluttering coed up to his hotel room after an out-of-town reading and having her take a ride on the cock less traveled? Research for a book about infidelity.

Phil never wanted to be that guy. He never wanted the voice of Marty Fleck in his head, uninvited and unmutable, justifying all his behavior as if it were some kind of promotional campaign. He wouldn't be that guy. He wouldn't be that guy, and alone. He wouldn't be that guy. And by the time, last August, when Phil Camp realized that being someone whose ex-wife calls in a bomb scare at his wedding qualifies you for lifetime membership as That Guy, it was too late. He had already been limping five weeks.

So, to recap: Man writes book to pay off ex-wife. Book is supposed to be a spoof. World takes book seriously. Man's life changes. Man under whose name book was written, his life changes as well. Ex-wife paid off, but pissed. Ex-wife makes phone call on man's second-wedding day. Man's life doesn't change in way he planned. Man's ass hurts. Man limps. Man under whose name book was written, his ass hurts as well.

Boy, it would have been great for Phil if it were all that simple. If the So, to recap... did indeed recap so. But logic and time got in the way. It made no sense that Phil's ass would wait almost a year and a half after the canceled wedding to voice its displeasure. None. Especially since he had driven out to Rumson a week after the incident to confront Trish. It was Saturday, February 23, 2002. Around 7 p.m. Phil remembered it the way any man remembers the last time he had the kind of sex he thinks about until that memory is usurped by a more vivid, more current, gloriously dirtier version.

She was leaning in the doorway of one of her father's houses when Phil fishtailed into the driveway and slammed the driver's side door so hard he scared himself. Just for a second, then Trish smiled and his anger was redetonated.

"Any calls?" he snarled.

"Good one, Marty," she said. "I know my ex-husband couldn't have come up with anything that clever."

He was now three strides away. But his fury misstepped and in that second, he took too long a look at her. Wow. Can you have that much rage and an erection at the same time and not wind up in a mug book? Well, sure. That's why they call it a raging hard-on.

She wore a soft, expensive, light blue jogging suit she must have tossed on just out of the shower. Must have. Her professionally dickered, computer-mixed blond streaks were still wet. And the southbound zipper on her top more than indicated that underwear hadn't even aspired to afterthought.

They thrashed around naked on the living-room rug where others had only been required to remove their shoes, and Trish's shrieks were so loud, if the house had been anywhere other than Rumson, neighbors would have heard her two acres away. But who has less than two acres in Rumson? Maybe an ex-husband living in a pool house.

And that was the former Trish Camp's sentence for the Class A felony of making a terrorist threat over the phone: Five to seven yelps.

Phil drove away just after nine o'clock that night, pretty sure he was now a solid candidate for a Jerry Springer panel "I Slept with My Ex-Wife Rather Than Turn Her In!" Amanda came by his apartment the next day to pick up four liquor boxes and a suitcase worth of weekend sundries. She brought her grown kid (a daughter, as it turned out), a twenty-five-year-old, taller, more angled, darker-haired version of Amanda. Phil had met her for the first time the week prior, just before the alarm went off in the synagogue. On this occasion, their exchange was even briefer. "Well," said Sarah (her name, as it turned out), "it was nice almost getting to know you."

That turned out to be the extent of Phil's punishment. The sting lasted half a second, then Amanda, with no room in the liquor boxes for anything other than closure, laughed and said, "Phil, I'm grateful. And I can tell you are, too. Somebody was doing for us what we couldn't do for ourselves."

Yeah, somebody.

So, it couldn't have been that. Couldn't. He hadn't even mentioned Trish to the Irish Shrink until a week ago, just before he was about to go in for the disk surgery. Ass hurting, limping for nine months. This was the answer. Disk surgery. Happy March Madness. Happy Purim.

Oh, he thought he had told the full story before, sometime in the last two years, but he hadn't. It was near the end of the session, and the Irish Shrink had said something like, "Phil, maybe you're limping all these months because you're making the hero's journey..." Something like that. But Phil had laughed and said, "Yeah, the hero's journey. How many guys can claim their ex-wife called in a bomb scare to their wedding?"

"Excuse me?" said the Irish Shrink.

"My ex-wife, Trish. Called in a bomb scare at the temple. You know that."

"I know about the bomb scare."

"I told you it was Trish."

"No, you didn't."

"Of course I did."

"Phil, I think I would have remembered a detail like that."

"I know I told you."

"Phil," exhaled the Irish Shrink, "I've noticed over the years that on occasion you confuse things you think you've told me with things you might actually have told someone else. Like your brother."

Phil jumped in between "bro" and "ther." "No way," he said. "I would never tell my brother this. Do you know about my brother? Have you been paying attention?"

"Yes, I have."

"Are you sure I didn't tell you?"

"Yes."

Phil half-snorted, clearly entertained by his own denial. Is that progress? "Well," he said, "it happened two years ago." My Ex-Wife Called in a Bomb Scare at My Wedding and I Didn't Tell My Therapist for Two Years!! -- on the next Jerry Springer.

"We really should talk about this."

"Fine," Phil said. "When I get out of the hospital."

"When are you going into the hospital?"

"Next week. For disk surgery."

"I thought you were going on vacation next week."

"I am. But I'm spending the vacation getting the disk surgery."

"You didn't tell me you had decided on disk surgery."

"Oh, come on!"

"Phil." "Okay, I'll give you the Trish thing. But I know I told you about this shit."

"You said 'vacation.'"

"Some vacation."

"Indeed...anyway," said the Irish Shrink, which meant the session was over.

Copyright © 2009 by Bill Scheft