THE BOOK THAT DOESN’T EXIST

 
I got an email from a literary agent: “Just read your op-ed in the New York Times and have spent the past couple hours reading everything you’ve written. Your op-eds are rooted in your personal experience, yet have universal appeal.”

Nice! Do I write a book about real estate? And then I would lecture at the Cleveland JCC Jewish Book Fair and sell product. But the writing game is so formidable, so competitive, even locally. How many more books does the world need? A thousand? Have you read Bart Wolstein’s Crossing The Road to Entrepreneurship or Maury Feren’s Wheeling and Dealing? These authors were both Clevelanders who died shortly after self-publishing. Simon’s book is about real estate and Feren’s is about selling vegetables.

Veggies. Why not. How about french fries? My son Ted was astounded in 1990 when I gave up french fries at the Fort Erie, Ontario, Burger King. I said, “No more greasy fries.” We were on our way to Toronto to see the new Blue Jays stadium.

Chicken . . . I often wound up at the KFC on Shattuck Avenue (a hangout with absolutely no countercultural status) when I hitchhiked to California in the 1970s.

KFCs are hard to find lately. Where did they all go?

A burger book? Sonic Burger, In-N-Out, Steak n Shake. What about Arby’s — the non-burger? I liked Arby’s roast beef sandwich with Arby’s Sauce. And add a Jamocha shake. In Cleveland there was an Arby’s knock-off, Beef Corral (a k a Barf Corral), owned by the Modzelewski brothers, former Browns players.

When my daughter Lucy was little, she designed a coat-of-arms for me that read “No Fries.” That’s my legacy unless I crank out a real estate book.

The real estate book . . . in 2016 I wrote a proposal, outline and sample chapter, and my lit agent got no takers for the project. Here are some sample chapter titles from the proposal: “Build an Ark: this place is flooding,” “Booms, bubbles and cash flow,” “We have standards,” “Job #1: get the money in the bank,” “Gotta serve somebody,” “Pull the trigger,” “Never on Sunday (because the tradesmen are on their boats in Lake Erie),” “Quasi-Legal Advice,” “Renting the American Dream,” “Jazz and Real Estate.”

I wouldn’t entirely rule it out, the real estate book, just yet. Or some sort of book. AKs like me like to self-publish about french fries, burgers, real estate, whatever.

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