(Chapter Eight) As Written By...My Agent

If you’re under the impression that reading this will close the book on some unanswered question, then do yourself a favour – don’t waste your time. After a couple of paragraphs, you won’t want to be here. What follows, reads more like a rant than a conclusive and accurate summary of Happiness.

What you’re getting here is a boring letter of complaint about a boring little man. A boring real life story about someone you’d never want to meet. Picture this annoying git being about six foot tall with a haircut that screams, “I’m a creative sort.” Picture the smarmy shit sat opposite me in my office, smiling at me from across my desk, whilst cradling a couple of supermarket carrier bags. Picture him wearing a tee-shirt that reads: “I’m a lover – not a writer.” Imagine, for a second, that you are an agent and this twerp is your most gifted client. Now, I think, you can begin to fathom where I’m coming from.

It wasn’t always like this. Oh no. I used to command respect in this industry – heck, I was the industry. If anybody wanted a book published, they would come see me. I had a beautiful wife and two perfect children; I ate at the most expensive restaurants in the capital, kept a brand new BMW M5 in my driveway, and every other weekend I would take a trip out of town so I could screw my wife’s 19 year-old yoga instructor. And who could blame me? – she’s got this cute boyish kind of hairdo, and tits like watermelons. It was such a pleasure to wake up in the morning and realise that life had worked out just how I had always planned. I was happy, or so I thought.

Happiness – what is happiness? Well, it took me a long time to work it out, but now I think I know the answer. I found the answer to this question through the process of elimination. I finally figured out that happiness is not the other half and the two spoiled brats; happiness is not eating at a fancy restaurant, happiness is not a brand new Beamer; and happiness is most definitely not shagging your wife’s 19 year-old yoga instructor – no matter how dirty she might be.

And so this brings me back to my current situation – I take a deep breath and try to keep my cool, but this guy is too much.
“Why have you got shopping bags?” I ask.
“I went shopping” he replies.
“I can see that, but I asked you to attend a critical business meeting and you turn up an hour late with milk, bread, cheddar cheese and sanitary towels.”
“Yeah?” he shrugs.
I pull back to look at him and say, “Maybe, instead of shopping, you should concentrate on finishing that book you keep promising me…”
And he says, “What’s that supposed to mean? So I’ve got to starve myself for my art now? Who am I – a hybrid of Gandhi and Andy Warhol?”
I’m pissed off, but I smile. And it’s at that precise moment I realise what happiness must truly be – happiness is, for once on God’s green earth, having a client that does at least one damn thing that I ask of them.



Chapter written by Shaun Davis.