Chapter 90: Eat Your Peas

And so, it began. The following week Harry called his contact at Simon and Schuster, and a literary agent took the train down and met us for lunch. We outlined our ideas and he told us their ideas and we pretty much came to a compromise on that. We were left with a tentative contract for our review, along with a proposed time frame for publication, and we promised to get it back to them in another week. One thing I was expecting and found I was correct with - there are a lot fewer zeroes on the checks when you’re dealing with non-fiction than with fiction.

Regardless, that wasn’t our primary motive in any case. Yes, money would be nice, at least certainly to Harry, but his big reason was to publicize the need to take better care of our infrastructure, and mine was to get back into science, at least in a roundabout way. I figured that my skills at communication and knowing how the world worked would complement his skills in engineering and analysis.

Marilyn’s reaction was not at all the one I was expecting. After I explained the idea, she just nodded and said, “Good! You need to do something different.”

“Huh?”

“Carl, you get bored doing the same thing over and over. You’re getting that way now, with the firm. I can tell.” I didn’t know what to say to that, and she continued. “Seriously, you’re not just about making money. I know you’ve sometimes wondered what it would have been like to teach instead of going into the Army. Give this a shot.”

Well, I knew what it was like to teach at the community college level as an adjunct, but I was curious about teaching at the four-year college level full time as a professor. I wasn’t going to do that, but this was an interesting idea. Could I write a book, or just half a book? I gave my wife a big hug and a smooch, which grossed out Charlie, and then called Harry and said my wife was game. A week later John’s publishing lawyer friend had approved, and we signed some papers and were authors-to-be.

The timing worked out. As soon as school was out, we packed the kids up and flew down to Orlando for a vacation at the House of Mouse. Harry would spend the time we were gone digging up some technical reports and journals on each of the various topics we had outlined for each chapter. Once we got back, I would start pulling things together and writing the ‘popular’ version. I made sure that we had the same word processing software, WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS, so that we could edit stuff easily and swap diskettes.

Disney World was old hat to me personally, since I had been there several times in my old life, but Marilyn had never been there, and certainly not the kids. The one thing I had never done before, though, was to stay at a Disney hotel on the site, and I figured that would be a whole lot easier. Charlie was not quite six, and the girls were almost three and potty trained. I had Taylor book us a suite in Disney’s Contemporary Resort, the gigantic A-frame structure that had the monorail going through it. It’s so expensive that the only people who stay there have more money than sense, so I certainly qualified this time around.

If you’ve ever been to Disney, you already know what it’s like. If you’ve never been to Disney, there is no describing it. Hordes of families with kids cram into the place on vacation weeks when school is out. If you can go a different time, do so. We couldn’t, not any longer. On the plus side, staying at a Disney resort allows you to beat the crowds to the starting gate in the mornings, with a direct monorail ride to the entrance. You can have breakfast with Mickey some days, and they have the Mouseketeer Club, which is a babysitting service if parents need to escape their loving offspring.

In 1987, Disney World consisted of just the two theme parks, the original Magic Kingdom and EPCOT. They were already building the Disney-MGM Studios complex, but that wouldn’t open for a few more years. It was still more than enough for us to see. Marilyn and I alternated duties, with one of us pushing the twins’ side-by-side stroller and the other trying to corral Charlie whenever he came in arm’s reach. I lost track of the times I sat in the little boat with Holly and Molly as we went through ‘It’s A Small World’ - I could sing the damn song by heart by the end of our stay! They loved it! I mimed hanging myself to Marilyn while she took a picture of me floating past one spot. On the other hand, she got the girls while Charlie and I explored Adventureland and Frontierland. Since I don’t do roller coasters, I let Marilyn take Charlie on Space Mountain. He made her take him on that three times!

(I did Space Mountain once, on the first trip through, with Marilyn’s little brother Paul, when he was only Charlie’s age. It was brand new, and I had no idea what this gigantic silver Hershey’s Kiss was. After we got off, with me shaking and swallowing hard, Paul looked up at me and said he had been so scared he had almost cried. I just put my arm around his shoulder and said, “Me, too, buddy! Me, too!”)

I’m not sure who was more exhausted at the end of each day, the kids, or the grownups. We spent two days in the Magic Kingdom and one day in EPCOT, saw the fireworks every night, and spent another day over at Sea World. By the time we flew home, I was thoroughly theme-parked out.

Then Marilyn got really silly. “Could you imagine doing this with four children?” she asked.

I swallowed hard and looked over at her. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

She started at that. “No! I’m just saying, if we had another child...”

“Come here for a second. I haven’t punched you lately, and I think I’m way overdue!”

Marilyn laughed at that and ignored me. Jesus Christ! Four kids? That wasn’t funny!

When we got home, I got to work writing. I spent most afternoons and several hours every evening working on the book, although a lot of the time was going through various reports with a highlighter and trying to turn truly awful scientific jargon onto something that could be even remotely interesting to an average human being. I usually spent a few minutes at the end of the day on the phone with Harry, asking him to find me examples of an issue that were from this country, not someplace else.

After the introduction, we had a chapter on roads and the highway system. From roads we segued into bridges, from bridges we moved on to water systems, which led to septic systems, which led to flood control sewers, then dams, etc. etc. etc. Part of each chapter was a history lesson, on why this stuff was important and how it had affected the growth and prosperity of the United States. One helpful thing, to me at least, was that way back when, I had been an avid viewer of the History Channel and the Discovery Channel, which had yet to be invented. It was amazing the oddball stuff that I retained.

We had the book mostly done by mid-August. The one thing we had the most problem with was the title. Non-fiction books like this need two titles, a main title to catch people’s attention, and the sub-title to tell what the book was really about. You know, like Horny Sluts In Action: The Effect Of Birth Control On American Economic Productivity. Nobody pays attention to productivity; everybody pays attention to horny sluts. (Okay, that might be a little extreme, but not by much!) Our sub-title was straightforward, America’s Crumbling Infrastructure and the Need to Rebuild It. What we needed now was something in the way of a title, and both Harry and I kept coming up with a blank.

First, we tried The Coming Crisis, next came The Coming Collapse, then we were stumped for a bit, and went back to Crisis, and then on to The Looming Disaster. That one lasted a week before we both decided it really sucked. By that point it seemed like the real looming disaster was the book. Simon and Schuster sent back a first draft with more red edits than book. Fortunately, most of the red simply required us to move things around some and cut and paste some sections.

And then it became easy, because the publishing house named it. Our agent/editor went through the second draft and found it acceptable and used something from the prologue.