FIRST-TIME AUTHOR

I wasted most of my youth surfing the web. Actually, perhaps “most” is an understatement. It might be more accurate to say that my meals were often brought within a foot radius of the keyboard, sleep was neglected, jobs ignored, and family members outright spurned. Even the previously popular television fell victim. One fall day it occurred to me, after several months of listless chair-bound clicking, that there were publications on the Internet that paid – paid – for written submissions. Assuming I played my cards right, I might never need to leave my precious monitor again.

I decided to target a few journals as candidates for my work before I actually wrote anything, so that I could tailor my style. There were the major publications, of course ... the Times, the Tribunes, the Stars and Compasses and Weeklys of the Internet world. I tried them first, thinking the rewards would be greater. I viewed the audience size as important – when my audience came to adore me, as they undoubtedly would, I could rise through the cut-throat ranks of young journalists to become the world's first 16-year-old syndicated columnist.

As fate would have it, there were mysterious oversights on all of the sites of these major publications – specifically, there was no sign anywhere of a place to submit my pieces. I searched to no avail for an email or even an actual mailing address ... I would have been willing to buy my own stamps, under duress.

So I tried the B-List: the Journals, the Monthlies and so on. I emailed my work to every magazine and newspaper I could Google. My most eloquent piece was entitled, “High School Delinquency: Fact, or Fiction?” Other pieces mused on the many subjects that invaded my daily life – my brother, my brother's hamster, my aggravation with everything that distracted me from the Internet including my brother and my brother's hamster, the faulty vending machine in my high school dining hall, etc. I can only assume, after years of waiting, that all of these emails and envelopes containing my submissions were tragically lost in the shuffle. No matter. Several weeks later, to the shock and noted chagrin of both my parents, I finally came across someone avant garde enough to handle my submissions. His name was Bob.

Bob was the editor-in-chief of a small web publication, “Akadot.com”, the main purpose of which was to inform its readers on the finer points of Japanese animation. This fine webzine had a distinguished section called “Live Action Anime Experiment” in which they singled out cliches oft portrayed in the anime industry and then tried to establish, through trial and error, whether these theatrical cliches held true in real life. At the end of each anecdotal piece, a small note to readers requested submissions of ideas for Live Action Anime Experiments. Although none of my existing pieces fit this concept exactly, I saw my scheme finally coming to fruition and immediately set to work crafting an email pitch for Bob.

Bob bought it. Literally. When I asked him, via email, how I would be paid, he replied with the question, “What sort of anime do you enjoy watching and what do you own?” Sensing a trick question, perhaps meant to weed out the non-anime fans in the herd, I wrote back a careful response.

“Well, Bob,” it began, “I enjoy all sorts of anime, although I don't really like anything with pedophilic undertones and I understand the Japanese really like that sort of thing. I don't really own any anime at the moment, although I watch more of it than anyone else I know -- but perhaps you could help me change all that by letting me write that piece for you.”

“Great!” Bob wrote back. “I really like the idea you submitted. We can talk more about your payment when you submit a draft to me.” Elated, I immediately began calling friends and neighbors – not to gloat, but rather to form a crack team of minions, who would all assist in my investigative reporting. I had decided that my Experiment would be to designed to show just how many people on the East Coast care about anime. It (loosely) fulfilled the premise of the article and it showed off the breadth of my audience in one fell swoop. It was genius.

I gathered together a motley crew of 4 fellow students and presented them with a mission: we were going to poll the New Jersey and New York area and gain an idea of the general knowledge of anime amongst the layman. This mission might have seemed daunting, or even pointless to some ... but I knew my crew well. These were the kind of people who liked to confuse and harass others, to compensate for the many years of ridicule and torment they had suffered as children for being labeled as complete and utter dorks. To this end, a bizarre poll was right up their alley. In fact, it was the sort of thing they'd exploit for hours of entertainment whether it had a point or not.

That still left the question of how to go about the poll. I decided on a visual recognition test. I compiled a folder full of pictures of characters, organized by level of obscurity. The levels were color-coded. I made laminated name tags for myself and my minions, labeling us as Akadot members of the press. Despite my meticulous preparations, some kinks developed within the crew: my best friend Jai refused to wear her name tag; Jen refused to do anything but smoke; and Cindy, our camera woman, had never held a manual camera before.

We began our poll in New York City, at St. Mark's Place to be exact. It's not a city of friendly, smiling faces. In the Village where we faced the added difficulty of approaching strangely colored hair and piercings in just about every body part we could name (and some we can't name). Then again, those years of pent-up anger over stolen milk money can sometimes be a blessing to an investigative reporter. We persevered despite the eyes-averted, brisk-walk policy of New Yorkers.

We showed every person we stopped pictures and asked him/her to identify a character by name or show. Each person began at level 1, and moved up the scale incrementally for every character they could identify. For example, if they could not identify one level 2 character, we tried giving them another level 2 character until they got one right and moved up to level 3, and if they couldn't identify any we sent them on their merry, pathetic way.

St. Mark's Place is full of Japanese restaurants, comic stores, novelty shops, and even a place called "Japan USA." Although we avoided the places which would obviously have biased the poll (if you're hanging out in "Japan USA" you better know what anime is), we hoped that the atmosphere would allow us to poll more knowledgeable fans from New York than would have otherwise been possible.

Early on in the day, as we were lying in the wait for a suitable victim, a man walked by wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with an anime character's face. "Oh," we thought naively, "surely this guy could make it through at least level 1." When showed a picture of Goku, the character right on his chest, he stared at us blankly like a deer in headlights. Sighing and pointing at the large, large "DRAGONBALL Z" written on his stomach, we walked off to go find a couple beers and some Valium. It was going to be a long day.

Most of our victims had to be captured before they could be polled, and wriggled like little fishies until we were done and allowed them to escape. However, some decided to take some initiative. One fellow, a young vendor, took aside a crew member, all the while grinning and gesturing towards the display table, and told us that he would be happy to take the survey - if we would buy some underwear. Eh heh. Holding back our instinctive desire to shout and slam him against the back wall with one mighty bitchslap, we tried to look flattered, blushed, and polled him ... forcibly. No underwear was purchased.

After viewing the results of the New York poll, I noticed that nobody had made it past level 2, but almost everyone made it past level 1. In other words, when these people heard the word "anime," visions of Pikachu danced in their heads. Thus reinforcing our belief that God was against us and wanted us to have that third yellow Valium.

Next on the list of places to poll was the park in our hometown of Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Cindy had a nervous breakdown after her first day with the camera and had to be relieved of duty. Emphysema Jen was dropped from the Team (for obvious reasons). At the last minute I managed to recruit my classmate Leyan Lo, an annoyingly smart Asian boy with two loves in life: Frisbee and Rubik's Cube. (Two years after I graduated high school, Leyan headed off to Cal Tech, where he went on to obtain the world record of 11.13 seconds for the fastest Rubik's Cube solve in history. He appeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where he solved that damn cube in 18.9 seconds. I was watching. I got drunk and called him with an itemized list of all the reasons I hated his guts, and then broke down and started crying, all the while repeating, “No I's serious, man, I love you, man.” I still hear from Leyan on holidays and birthdays – but since that night it's been awkward.) Leyan blatantly refused to do anything but play with his cube or toss a Frisbee, but at least he wasn't driving people away with the stench of nicotine and early lung failure, and he didn't burst into tears at the sign of a flashbulb.

I was still so doped up from all that Valium I had to take in New York that polling was proving kind of tricky. And the people we might have attracted were all scared off by the sight of me dancing on a picnic table, singing along with Steely Dan - "How about a kiss from your Cousin Dupree?" I had a great time, but the rest of my crack team despaired of finding anyone willing to talk to us, and decided that an inebriated game of Frisbee would be more fun anyway. Then we realized as it began to rain that we'd spent the whole day playing Frisbee and hadn't polled a single person. This, of course, led to more Valium consumption (we'd upgraded to the blue pills by this time). We no longer questioned God's crusade to ensure our eminent failure but rather accepted it as an innate circumstance of living.

The following day, after a couple pots of coffee and a few trips to the bathroom to remove the last of the keg and those elephant-sized Valium from our system, we headed off to the Bridgewater Mall, at the crossroads of three New Jersey highways. Here, armed with shopping bags filled with Alka-seltzer, Pepto-Bismol, Ammodium AD and of course our old friends Samuel Adams and Valium, we hoped to poll people from a variety of places in one fell swoop of deft census. To our surprise, the results were heartening, so heartening that it took only a few white Valium to keep us afloat. Of the people we polled, many were more knowledgeable about anime than we dreamed possible after our run-in with the bland New Yorkers. About 43% of the people we talked to made it through level 2.

“Dude, man,” I said from the door of the unisex bathroom, “I bet you so many freakin' people read Akadot. I am gonna be” -- here I paused to vomit into the sink -- “so freakin' famous.”

“Yes,” Jai said doubtfully. This was the crux of our relationship – she humored my narcissism, my detachment from reality, and my ineptitude. I in turn ignored her insincerity.

Leyan was leaning against the door, fiddling with his Cube. “Just because a few people at the mall watch cartoons doesn't necessarily mean they enjoy reading about them, not to mention read that particular site.” I wanted very badly to retaliate ... but instead, I weakly dove into my burlap sack. I resurfaced with a fistful of Alka-Selzer tablets and more prescription pills.

That Sunday, I sat down at the computer, cracked my knuckles, and poured my soul into a probing survey study of the popularity of certain animated characters in the TriState area. I described a heroic journey through, if not the Heart of Darkness, then at least some cloudy weather. It ended on a particularly poignant note: We had, I wrote, polled a native-born Japanese girl who broke down in front of us when shown images of her homeland. She hugged each of us, wiped the tears from her eyes, and asked if she could keep the picture from the notebook. In this supposed incident, I smiled kindly and gave her the entire notebook, thus ending my survey. Then I and my team, none of whom had ever doubted me or held a Rubik's cube a day in their lives, drove off into the sunset. I, of course, was safe to drive because ethical journalists don't go on Valium binges while they're on the clock.

Akadot ran the piece the following week. Although I provided my email address and phone number, I never received any feedback from my fans.

Two weeks later, I received my payment from Bob. It was a carton filled with anime DVDs.