The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written (11 page)

Johnny threw his head back in shame. “Gunn would have had an alarm system! Duh!” Johnny decided to write his way out of it.

Gunn hugged Cat’s marble tombstone. “I wish that category five hurricane and that 7.5 earthquake that I slept through last night hadn’t knocked out the power to the entire East Coast, thereby disabling my state-of-the-art alarm system.”

Gunn chewed his cigar in a virile, manly manner. “The police are looking for a girly man with a limp, but if I find him first, he’ll be toast. He’ll be burned toast. He’ll be burned heel toast. Why don’t people eat the heels of a loaf of bread? They are just as nutritious. Americans waste too much good food, don’t they? And when I am done with Cat’s killer, he’ll be so crusty he’ll look like barnacles encrusted on the bottom of a bass boat beached in Barcelona. He’ll be so crispy I can serve him with two family side dishes at KFC.”

Maybe,
Gunn thought,
Cat’s killer limps because he only has one leg. I will find him and disarm him, too.

The word “taut” flashed through Johnny’s mind. He knew he had to build suspense. He also knew that he must use excessive foreshadowing for several pages to add to his page count.

These thoughts naturally gave way to thoughts of Cat’s final moments.
Who would kill Cat? Who? Who? Who? Why would anyone kill her? Why? Why? Why? She was completely, totally, wholly harmless unless she was on her pain medicine and falling all over the place holding a switchblade, and I have the scars on my arms to prove it. Why had Cat been armed with an Uzi submachine gun and Chinese throwing stars, both of which police found unused and tucked under the cushions in my sectional sofa?

Little did he know

Johnny remembered using that phrase already and deleted it.

Littler did he know, Gunn would soon run into the aforementioned mother of Rafe, a.k.a. “Sparky,” his first child who would be born in a trough in a barn on a commune in Flagstaff, Arizona, in only thirty-four short months.

After kissing Cat’s tombstone and getting a cemetery worker to help him get his lips unstuck from the frozen marble, Gunn got blind drunk and left new Geo Storm paint on thirty-four cars along Main Street.

Johnny sat back.
There’s that number again,
Johnny thought.
I have established this number in this book for some reason. I am obviously subconsciously fixated on the number thirty-four.
Johnny knew that English majors dissecting this novel would be able to tell the world why in a few years: “Well, let’s see, Bob, thirty-four is a number divisible by two prime numbers, and therefore the author is trying to tell us something mathematical about the universe involving the numbers two and seventeen. Two … scoops? Seventeen … magazine?
Seventeen
magazine has the scoops?”

Johnny knew, of course, that they would be dead wrong.

Johnny shook off
his
tortured past and plowed ahead:

Gunn plowed down Main Street in the snow in a drunken attempt to rekindle the fiery image of Cat’s hair and the collision that originally brought Cat singed and bleeding into his life. That’s when he ran smack dab into the back of Thais Knotts’s police cruiser at precisely 7:34 AM.

Johnny scrolled back to read his work so far, declared it “thin,” and decided to add some back-story to interrupt the plot and amaze the reader with his command of useless back-story.

Thais Knotts was the aforementioned mother of Rafe, Rafe who would despise her name because it was a boy’s name and what, were her parents crazy when they named her, or blind, or what? Rafe kind of liked “Sparky,” though. That name had spark. It had fire. It was combustible. It was fiery. It sizzled.

Maybe,
Rafe the unborn baby thought,
they were relighting the pilot light in the water heater when they named me, or am I nicknamed for Old Sparky, the nickname for electric chairs in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, New York, Texas, and West Virginia, and why do I have so many questions for one not yet born, though I can’t wait to be born, learn to talk, get potty-trained, and ask my parents about my screwy name?

Why are there green lines here?
Johnny thought.
I’m only getting a little experimental. Other writers do it, that stream-of-consciousness stuff that wins them awards and critical acclaim, but when I do it, I get all these freaking green lines. What does Microsoft have against a little experimentation? Forget Microsoft. Bill Gates never wrote a romance novel.
Johnny took another sip of tea and continued.

Thais Knotts limped back to Gunn’s window and pointed a very large, scary, police-issue, snub-nosed .38 at him. “Don’t you move a single, solitary muscle, buster! Don’t you even sneeze! Don’t you even flinch a capillary or I’ll cap you, you scum-sucking pig!”

Gunn froze, willing his capillaries not to flinch. He had already taken several muscle relaxers to smooth out his drunken rampage, so he wasn’t worried about moving any muscles.

But when Thais saw Gunn all frozen and inert and bleeding and stinking blind drunk and gagging on half a Cuban cigar, she smiled a silly little smile when she beheld his masculine manliness. He was manly in a way other men weren’t. He was a manly, mannish man with a manly, mannish smell, a manly, mannish face, and long, manly, mannish nose hairs. Lesser men would have plucked or trimmed those scraggly, dark strings hanging down from his nostrils to his upper lip, but not this scum-sucking, manly, mannish pig. Thais knew at that moment that Gunn was the most manly, mannish man ever created since the beginning of time. She knew that her destiny was to bear him a child whom she would nickname Sparky in thirty-four months.

“
Oh, you poor, poor, poor, poor, dear,” Thais said, her words dripping carelessly with careful amounts of caring care. “Are you okay?”

“
No,” Gunn said while licking alcohol-thinned blood and Cuban cigar debris from his lips. He, too, decided that Thais was his real soul mate based on the size of her gun, the ruggedness of her police-issue trousers bulging with ammunition, and her silly little laugh. “Can you, can you heal me, oh fair one with the large gun, rugged pants, and silly little laugh? Will you, will you heal me, you who should be Miss America provided you say politically correct things in all your answers to the judges even if your answers are against everything you believe in?”

Thais’s face melted into that soft and caring face women use whenever they hold a newborn baby, kitten, puppy, or new pair of shoes to add to the thousand and five pairs overflowing their closets, most of these shoes worn once with an outfit that has since gone out of style everywhere but
The View.

“
I can sure try,” Thais said with care dripping from her silly little voice onto his lap and forming a puddle of caring goo. “But you want me to heal you? How can you know that I’m the one? I never went to medical school, though I wanted to. I faint at the sight of blood anyway. I’ve always been that way. I’d skin my knee, see the blood, and pow! Right over onto my noggin and bleeding worse than before. Scraped off many an eyebrow in my day, I have. And don’t even get me started about scabs, especially the oozing ones that look like dried up frogs. But … how do you know that I’m your one and only?”

Gunn chewed on his cigar, reduced after twelve hours and a major collision to a saliva-filled thumb of Cuban tobacco. “You had me at scum-sucking pig.”

Thais’s eyes misted up, and she said so sweetly, “That is so sweet.”

“
I know it is,” Gunn said with a knowing air. “It’s why I said it. I say sweet things so you don’t think I’m completely an incorrigible rogue. I say sweet things because I do have a soft side and a rare tea cozy collection. I say sweet things to get you romantically interested in me because otherwise you would arrest me and throw away the key. Look, I have to pee because of the thirteen Tom Collins I just drank before washing them down with a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, so if you don’t mind …”

Thais marveled at Gunn’s ability to drink and to be able to converse after he should have been brain dead hours ago.

“
Oh,” Gunn added brokenly, “and I think my leg’s broken.”

“
You have another one,” Thais said with a silly little womanly giggle.

So wise, this woman,
Gunn thought.
She is a femme fatale, a beautiful, siren-like woman capable of destroying a man’s soul and life by making him feel bad, confused, and infatuated all at the same time. She’s like a dame in a Bogart movie, but not the one with that decrepit boat and all those Germans. You know, a Bogart movie with the dame who shows up at the detective’s office flashing her gams wrapped in black market nylons, and she turns out to be really, really evil and really, really beautiful at the same time, kind of like Queen Elizabeth I, who wasn’t actually that pretty, but if you wanted to keep your royal artist’s gig, you had to paint her beautifully or she’d chop your fool head off in front of a cheering crowd of English soccer fans and other theologians.

Thais was like that, the yin to his yang, the dark to his light, the snap, crackle, and pop to his Rice Krispies, a real woman who put on her police-issue trousers one leg at a time and carried a huge, scary, police-issue .38.

“
Let’s go to my place,” Gunn groaned placidly, because most of the alcohol in his blood had bled out and he was finally feeling painfully painful pain.

“
Sure,” Thais said surely. “Can you drive?”

“
Yes,” Gunn said affirmatively with another manly groan. “Only one of my legs is broken. You don’t mind shifting my gears for me, do you? I am, after all, blind drunk, crippled, and infatuated.”

“
I don’t mind,” Thais said mindlessly. “I am, after all, left-handed,” she added handily.

Their eyes met. It was a romantic moment, kind of like the one Gunn had with Cat only different.

Johnny decided not to break any new literary ground here, figuring that one romantic moment was just as romantic as any other was. Why beat a dead horse?

Gunn backed the new Geo Storm from the back bumper of Thais’s police car and sped off into the sunrise, his front bumper gouging the asphalt in front of him, sparks setting off several small brush fires that would later be blamed on careless campers on their way to spend their vacation at a campground. But who were they kidding? They were driving a Recreational Vehicle, an RV. You don’t really camp if you’re inside an RV, right? Camping involves tents, marshmallows, nocturnal critters, rocks and sticks gouging your backside all night, and mosquitoes—not indoor plumbing, satellite TV, a refrigerator, and those ridiculous paper lamps strung up everywhere like a campsite is supposed to look like Chinese New Year.

When they arrived at his mansion, Thais taught Gunn the famous yoga position number thirty-four so he could sober up comfortably. They formed a millipede, a perfect circle, his feet to her ears, her feet to his ears. They remained in this position for thirty-four minutes enjoying each other’s feet and wondering when the fun was supposed to begin.

Johnny had written himself into a corner. He had no idea what his characters were enjoying. He was in an uncomfortable position. It was late, he was lonely, he hadn’t been in the company of a woman in years, and his characters were staring at each other’s feet.

He decided to insert some snappy, modern, romantic dialogue:

“
Are you—”

“
No. Are you—”

“
Of course not.”

“
You … aren’t?”

“
No.”

“
I meant—”

“
Oh. Um, you don’t have to be.”

“
So you’re really—”

“
Yes.”

Gunn squinted as Clint Eastwood used to squint before he became all wrinkly and old as the Appalachian Mountains, which are the oldest mountains in North America. “By the way,” Gunn said, pondering aloud, “the New River in southwest Virginia is one of the oldest rivers on the planet. Why they named it the New River is beyond me, but if you ever need a definition for irony, you have one now.”

“
Thanks,” Thais said with thanking thanks in her thankfully thankful heart.