The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written (39 page)

“
I really love her, man,” Johnny said. “And I don’t mean the Vega. I went to Henebry’s, but they wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

The man scowled. “They never do. They act like their diamonds are better than these. They aren’t. They all come from essentially the same place, and that ring was bought by a man in love.” He shrugged. “So bad things happened. It’s the thought that counts, right?” The man counted out eight hundreds and slid one back.

“
I should have, um, bid lower the first time, huh?”

The man nodded. “Yep. I’d have started at four hundred and come up.”

Johnny pocketed the hundred. “Thanks. I’m, um, kind of new at this. Um, why didn’t you take it all?”

The man smiled. “It’s the holidays, you know?”

Johnny put the ring in his pocket—the man had no fancy box—but that was all right. Johnny rubbed it occasionally, just to make sure it was still there. He even placed it on the F7 button on his computer keyboard since he had never used that button in his life.

“
Now,” he said to the ring, “it’s time to finish the worst romance novel ever written.”

Johnny had said these very words to himself on several other occasions, fully intending to follow through, but he just couldn’t. Because of Gloria, Johnny had so many ideas that they flowed out of him like lava, like melted butter on popcorn, like Krazy Glue when you first snip off the plastic tip.

Johnny wrote a lot of stuff, cleansing his literary colon, and none of it was remotely romantic.

After a night of delivering pizzas and jamming to Vibe 100 on 610 AM, he wrote a poem that didn’t suck big or little rocks:

“
I Want”

the theme from Shaft playing as I stroll through life—

Pope who plays harmonica, digs zydeco music, and flat-foots with holy sandals—

Ella Fitzgerald to skat-sing “Happy Birthday to Me” if I turn fifty—

a reggae version of “Home on the Range” to be our new national anthem—

Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, Dizzie Gillespie, and Chuck Mangione to blow their horns on Williamson Road every morning—

to be the missing arm of Def Leppard’s drummer—

music, real music, music so real I can taste it, touch it, spank it, and flip it—

my song to drown out the noise pollution that masquerades as modern music—

my music to make children of all ages, invisible rabbits, Republicans, wardrobe-malfunctioning singers, and even bobble-head dolls nod along to my beat.

After receiving yet another sock from the rich lady and the booger taunts of the evil Bobby, he wrote a stream of consciousness rant that actually made some sense eventually:

Everything these days is really fake. Fake hair, fake eyes, fake gold, fake teeth, fake lips, fake. It’s all fake, yet folks say they’re just trying to be real. What’s up with tanning salons? They’re fake. Paying to get skin cancer. I know they’re safe nowadays but just about everything is bad for you including too much sun. What are freckles anyway? I think they’re sexy and not just because Gloria has them. They’re real. You can’t fake a freckle but I’m sure some cosmetic genius will one day sell freckle implants for the freckle-challenged, which is absurd. Then they’ll sell moles and birthmarks, too, like they’re cool which they aren’t because I have a few moles and they’re probably pre-cancerous.

There’s a loaded word. Pre-cancerous. Everything is pre-cancerous when you think about it, right? Newborn babies, the corn on the cob I’ll eat later tonight with the Glory beans and potatoes and pork chops smothered in oregano and onions. Pre-cancerous. It’s just a word, just a crummy old word doctors use to scare the health into us so they can have jobs.

All the fear in the world is fabricated, made up. I swear nothing’s true out there, nothing. The sun is hotter, the sun is colder, the polar caps are melting, the polar caps are not melting, a new Ice Age is coming—at least to the theaters. Why does New York City get so much abuse in the movies? It’s been destroyed over and over again ever since King Kong, which wouldn’t scare anyone today as if a gorilla is ever going to be that big. Bet no one told King Kong he had a pre-cancerous toe or thumb or bananas are bad for him or maybe that woman in his hands will never truly love him the way, say, a big female gorilla might. But we all want what we can’t have, we all want what looks good, we all want what’s fake. We want the topping on the ice cream and not the ice cream.

I’d love to see these fake people without their fake eyes and hair and makeup and capped teeth and botox treatment and implants. They’d look just like us, and since we don’t want to be ourselves, we wouldn’t want to be like them either. Then no one would be fake and we’d all eat pork chops together or watch old black and white movies about overgrown gorillas on the Empire State Building with pre-cancerous fur and laugh and have a good time without a care in the world … until some doctor figures all this happiness is bad, too, and puts out a warning label on happiness.

On second thought, let him. Let him put a label on happiness saying it’ll kill you and people will do it more. We humans are contrary that way.

So I deliver pizzas because no one has ever put a label on me.

After watching
Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer on TV,
which Angel scoffed at all the way through, Johnny wrote “How Rudolph Saved Christmas,” a version Angel might one day appreciate:

Here’s the story of a reindeer named Rudolph, who has a very shiny red nose. Rudolph’s parents try to keep Rudolph’s nose under wraps to protect his self-esteem. They glue mud to his nose, and this gives Rudolph a speech impediment, further destroying his self-esteem, making him smell like, well, mud, and keeping him from ever trying out for North Pole Idol. They feed him reindeer lichen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he doesn’t lichen it very much.

Rudolph falls in love with a doe named Clarisse, a bleached blond with false eyelashes and tattoos under her fur. Clarisse tells Rudolph she thinks he’s cute, and Rudolph has a conniption because his parents have only called him “Mud Nose,” “Lichen-thrope,” and “Ice Pack Baby” all his life.

On the day that Santa watches the young bucks’ first flying lessons. Clarisse flirts shamelessly with Rudolph, showing a lot of hoof. One look at Clarisse’s legs and Rudolph really does fly, partially because of the vicious Arctic crosswinds that day, but mainly because of the fumes from the glue holding all that mud onto his nose. Santa is impressed, laughing and shaking his morbid obesity so much that a glacier the size of Texas falls into the Arctic Ocean a thousand miles away causing former vice president Al Gore to make a movie about global warming, and Elvis, I mean, the elves, oh, I mean, the diminutive height-challenged wearers o’ the green all fall down on the job at the sweat shop, I mean, toy factory. The elves will later go on strike for unfair labor practices. I mean, who works on Christmas Eve besides pizza delivery drivers?

When Rudolph plummets to earth, the mud flies off his nose, and his nose starts to shine like a strobe light. The other reindeer—the cool and confident and normal-nosed reindeer, with their Volvos and trust funds and shaggy hair and clothes trendily bought at the thrift shop and lifelong addictions to Ritalin—stay away from Rudolph mainly because of his name, which is so … not Chad or Flip, or Tipper.

Rudolph runs away and hooks up with a blond wannabe dentist named Shermy, and a red-bearded prospector named Yukon Cornelius, who has somehow wandered about 2,000 miles from the Yukon. The three go on a long journey and eventually end up on the Island of Misfit Toys, soon to be a new reality show on Fox to be copied by every other network and beaten to death for a few years. The Island of Misfit Toys is a sad place where discarded toys hang out pining for children to smear boogers on, mishandle, and abuse them. The three meet and talk to Rubik’s Cube, Etch-a-Sketch, Mr. Potato Head, Sand Art, the entire cast from Toy Story, Mr. Bucket, board games like Monopoly and Sorry and Operation, decks of Old Maid, Pit, Rook, and Uno, assorted telescopes, an Easy-Bake Oven, several ant farms, Spirograph, a chemistry set, a Red Ryder BB gun, 500-piece puzzles, and model trains, planes, and automobiles. Their former child owners had kicked them to the curb because they didn’t have buttons to push, computer chips, or nifty sound effects. Children shoved them into closets or under beds or simply threw them out because they actually required imagination, manual dexterity, and thought to use.

These misfit toys had obviously scared the children.

The three friends leave the Island of Misfit Toys, which is as depressing a place as any standard pizza joint after closing, and run into the Abominable Snowman, nicknamed “Bumble,” yet another misunderstood being with bad hair, who terrorizes them because he really has no self-worth or anyone his size to play with. He had had a lonely childhood in the Himalayas, and yet, somehow, he ends up at the North Pole 10,000 miles away.

Rudolph’s parents, worried about losing their tax break, and Clarisse, in a rare show of physical activity other than singing a sappy song, go off into the night to find Rudolph. They run into the “Bumble,” who plans to eat them because he just cannot make friends without his stomach rumbling and saliva dripping from his mouth. After a stray icicle knocks out the Bumble—as if he couldn’t see a huge ice dagger the size of Connecticut falling on him—Shermy removes the Bumble’s teeth to save his friends’ lives, as if the “Bumble” cannot inhale or gum them to death in his rage afterwards.

Yukon Cornelius and the Bumble then go skydiving into a crevasse, and Rudolph thinks they’re dead. But they aren’t.

That would really scare the children, as if a fifty-foot-tall hairy, toothless, cannibalistic abominable snowman isn’t scary enough.

Yukon Cornelius and the Bumble will miraculously reappear in the last silly moments when the Bumble puts the star on Santa’s tree. Evidently, Bumbles bounce. They also like to roll bounce and have hydraulics on their sleds while listening to Latino dance music, but that’s another story.

A terrible worldwide blizzard ensues, threatening to cancel Christmas. A worldwide blizzard? Even at the equator? Is that even possible? Snowball fights in the Sahara? Global warming is a hoot, isn’t it, Mr. Gore? And isn’t having a blizzard at the North Pole redundant?

Rudolph, fresh off being a hero, shoves his flaming red nose into Santa’s face, and Santa decides he can save Christmas by using Rudolph’s beak to lead his sleigh through the blizzard, as if a single two-inch-wide red nose will do any good during an Arctic storm. I mean, how far could that light shine anyway? Five inches? Ten inches? Without GPS, Santa’s sleigh would have run into the first two-story house in Greenland.

Mrs. Claus decides to fatten up Santa, which is as redundant as an Arctic blizzard, and Rudolph with his nose so bright helps Santa deliver presents including the old school toys from the Island of Misfit Toys. What a waste! They’ll only get blown up or stomped or put on sale at a yard sale or auctioned off on EBay as a “collectible” or ignored all over again!

But that’s another story.

And we wouldn’t want to scare the children, would we?

Johnny hesitated running the story by Gloria because it would prove he hadn’t been working a lick on her story, and here he was again not writing the ending to her book.

Johnny knew the book would be total crap, but that was all right, too. He didn’t mind that the mice seemed to be doubled over laughing.
At least I think they’re laughing. I hope those last saltines weren’t too stale.
“No really,” he told them, “this is about to be one hundred percent, grade-A dung. I’d have to be crazy to submit this to anyone with a pulse.”

But,
he thought,
I do like hearing Gloria laugh, and after she reads it, I’ll pop the question and put that ring on her finger.

The mice seemed to applaud.

I have definitely been living here too long,
Johnny thought.
The mice are beginning to read my mind.

He clicked on the shortcut icon for
A Thorn for Emily.

Now where did I leave off? Oh yeah. Here goes nothing …

…
Gunn was still full of angst. He was also full of corn and undigested red meat.

He and Thais had been trying without success to have a baby. His seed had found no purchase in Thais’s sexy Brazilian uterus.
What am I doing wrong?
Gunn thought.
What? What are we doing wrong? What? Why? I’ve stopped riding my bicycle, I wear boxers, and I don’t hang out in hot tubs. I take vitamins that make my pee bright yellow and smell like cabbage soup. What else can I do to put a bun in Thais’s sexy Brazilian oven?