How I Became a Famous Novelist (16 page)

In this age when literate culture is threatened, where young men and women would rather shoot each other in video games or watch the fake drama of “reality” television than read, we don’t need more bile. We need careful, loving readers who are prepared to grab at small miracles in prose, wherever such treasures can be found.

“A Reader’s Request” prompted the most letters
The Atlantic
had ever received. There were counterattacks, and counter-counterattacks. Book blogs got especially fired up about the whole business. Georgina Maddox even went on the
Today
show to stick up for earnest writing.

Suddenly, buying my book was equated in readers’ minds with protecting a butterfly from a bully. Ortolan printed a whole second run of
The Tornado Ashes Club,
with a quote on the back cover:

“A promising young author.”

—
Georgina Maddox,
author of
A Reader’s Request

On Amazon I hit #843.

Third Stage:

In the late 1980s Cheerios Cheer Patrol commercials, Hazel Hollis is the blonde one in pigtails, with the belt of freckles
like the Crab Nebula smeared across her nose. VH1 sometimes shows these commercials in “Before They Were Famous” specials. They acquired a camp value after Hazel’s single “Clean Me Up” broke out in 2000 and was closely followed by the even more suggestive “Down There.” But it was playing Sister Bertrille in a sexed-up 2003 movie remake of
The Flying Nun
that put her on that global, Super Bowl–Coke-commercial level of fame.

And then of course came the inevitable cocaine-fueled tail-spin. She was videotaped calling a nightclub bouncer a “chink dago.” Then she backed her Hummer out of the parking lot at Tick-Tocks in Malibu and landed in the Pacific. She had to be fished out by the fire department.

That’s where
The Tornado Ashes Club
enters in. Her agents and managers decided that what she needed was a classy movie project. Somebody at some studio must’ve pitched them my book: it’s got the whole Christian thing, it’s a book so it’s Oscar bait, a perfect reputation-rehab role. She could play Genevieve, put some singles on the sound track.

Somehow, a copy got into Hazel’s hands. And she had it with her when she was leaving a hair salon and got into a screaming match with a paparazzo. She went at him, wielding my book like a hatchet.

On the cover of
US Weekly
three days later, the title was too blurry to read. But it’s there, in Hazel’s hand, next to her face contorted in Gorgonic fury. And celebrity journalists, always with their eye to detail, made sure to mention it.
The Tornado Ashes Club
was even mentioned in the court documents.

When the week was out I was #212 on Amazon.

Fourth Stage:

The alleged child molester was played by a guy I recognized. Only days later did I remember from where—he used to play the jolly gay guy on this short-lived sitcom about a convenience store called
Inconvenienced
.

But in this particular episode of
Law and Order: Criminal Intent,
he was playing a Christian youth group leader accused of killing an eight-year-old he’d molested. He played it really creepy—I think he’d been miscast on the convenience store show. In the scenes where the cops were scowling at him through the two-way glass in the interrogation room, he’s sitting in the metal chair, waiting for them to come back—and reading
The Tornado Ashes Club
.

I didn’t see the show when it aired. But Lucy called me immediately afterward, as I was flipping through some old X-Men comics and preparing for bed.

“Did you see that?”

“What?”

“
Criminal Intent
! We’ll send you a tape. This is gonna be huge.”

The key moment in the episode comes when Vincent D’Onofrio comes into the room. The alleged child molester puts down my book.

“Good book?” says D’Onofrio.

“Not bad,” says the molester.

D’Onofrio flings the book across the room in a rage.

“Certainly not
that
bad,” says the molester, icy calm.

“Maybe you can start a book club on Rikers Island,” says D’Onofrio.

It’s a great scene. Later it turns out the guy’s guilty.

I’m not sure if the recommendation of a fictional child molester on a TV detective show counts as “word of mouth.” You’d think it might hurt book sales. But once again David Borer claimed, “Any press is good press.” Maybe it was just a matter of getting people to recognize my book at the store. Or maybe there’s a lot of Christian child molesters out there looking for a good read.

Whatever it was, copies kept moving. Tell that to anybody who thinks Homer got there on merit alone.

As research for my novel, I’d read almost all of the Wikipedia page about tornadoes. As a tornado develops, something called a rear-flank downdraft gets going. That’s when the trouble starts. The tornado gets stronger and stronger, feeding on itself until it hits the ground and things really get crazy.

That’s what it felt like. Like a tornado, it’s hard to reconstruct in your memory; you just remember flashes. When I got the twenty-third spot on the
New York Times
best-seller list, Jon Sturges took me out to the 99 Restaurant for lunchtime steaks and we pounded fists. Derek and Hobart started asking me to sign copies for their coworkers. David Borer would call me twice a day to talk about movie offers. I started a correspondence with the Reverend Gary Claine, and he promised to keep praying for me. I would go down to Barnes & Noble every day, just for the thrill of seeing my book on the
BEST-SELLING AUTHORS
table. Ortolan sent me on a twelve-city book tour. Somebody else was picking up my minibar tabs so I was blitzed for a lot of it.

What I remember clearly is Philadelphia.

I stood at the podium of BookStew or whatever the place was called. I stared out at eighteen people who listened as I read.

“Sometimes it’s the simplest of things—a faint melody heard and remembered, the feel of your grandmother’s soft hand, smelling of baking, touching your cheek; a return to a place you dreamed of as a child; a bend in a tree worn from climbing. Memories that open up the chambers of your heart. Suddenly your soul fills up, like warm cow’s milk filling a pail on a chill November morning.”

I paused reverently before closing my book.

After the applause had died down, and I signed copies, and people started to filter away, I saw the girl with the scarf.

“Hi, I’m sorry,” she said. “I just—I really loved your book, and I just wanted to, I dunno, say thank you.”

I put on my best writer face, the face I’d been practicing in the mirror for months: reflective, concerned by the world’s sorrows, amused by the world’s folly. And I invited her back for a drink at the Ramada.

It all would’ve been creepily perfect, exactly true to my predictions, except this was like the worst Ramada in the entire world. We were making out in my room, and I pulled back the comforter, and there was this sort of octagonal stain on the sheets, a kind of electric yellow color, nothing natural, as though a highlighter had exploded. So I had to get that sorted out, which put the brakes on things. And then later, at around 2:30 A.M., there was a fire alarm. So we had to go out into the parking lot.

The girl with the scarf, of course, treated this like a great adventure. She held my arm and leaned her head on me.

“Write a poem,” she said.

“What?”

“Write a poem about this. You’re such a great writer. I bet you could totally write a poem about this.”

Christ,
I thought.
What have I done?

A Brief Note

I want to insert something here, because obviously, I’m describing some pretty bad things that I did, and it’s going to get much worse. I have a lot to answer for, I know that. But let me just tell you, Reader, three things:

1. Ever since I’d broken up with Polly, I couldn’t listen to the song “I’ll Never Find Another You” by the Seekers without bursting into tears.

2. Sometimes, on lonely nights, I’d brush my teeth with one of Polly’s old toothbrushes, which I’d saved since college.

3. At my lowest point, when I was writing
The Tornado Ashes Club
and not getting anywhere, I was 49/51 on whether or not to kill myself. I went so far as to go online and find out how many aspirin you need to take to finish the job.

Just remember all that.

P
ART
II
DECLINE AND FALL

13

NATO Military Headquarters, 2300 hrs

Admiral Jameson watched the flicking counters move across the CentInt Action Station. Tonight there was more movement than he’d ever hoped to see.

He reached into his pocket and took out a Marlboro cigarette. He was a four-star admiral, Commander in Chief, Atlantic Fleet, with thirty-five years in peace and war. He’d seen combat in Vietnam and nuclear standoffs from the White House. And he still had to hide his cigarettes in the sock drawer so his wife didn’t find them.

But tonight, he’d known he’d need one.

A Belgian officer leaned over. “Sir, it eez not permitted to smoke, according to regulations.”

Jameson looked him over. He saw the stripes that indicated a staff captain. He’d seen that face a thousand times before. The brash face of a man who never left the office.

“Son, tonight you’re going to see a lot of things that go against regulations.”

AH-1 Cobra Helicopter, over the Tyrrhenian Sea

Lieutenant David Brandshot turned around in his chair. He jerked off one earpiece of his headset.

“We just got word—can’t take you in any closer. Too much air traffic.”

Flynn strained to hear over the whir of the propeller.

“How the hell am I supposed to get into Venice?” he yelled back.

Brandshot pointed straight down. Flynn looked out the bay door to the sea below him. A Zodiac CZ7 boat was bobbing below. Fifty, maybe forty feet.

“You’re gonna have to jump!” Brandshot was struggling to yell back while still keeping his ship level.

Flynn hesitated. He hadn’t taken a real swim since lifeguarding on Cape Cod, twenty years before.

“Dammit, am I gonna have to come back there and push you?” Brandshot shouted. Holding the stick with one hand, he swiveled his head. Flynn was gone.

—excerpt from
Teeth of the Winged Lion
by Nick Boyle (Copyright © 1984 Anchorage Maritime Books and Nick Boyle, reprinted with permission of the author)

Yuhp! Yuhp! Yuhp!”

She let out yelps both wild and regular, like a jackrabbit being electrocuted in time with a metronome. Astride me she was bouncing at a lively clip for a woman of her age. My role in the whole business was more or less passive.

“YUHP!”

Then she slapped me hard on the chest. She pressed down with both palms, as though squeezing me out like the drained rind of an orange.

“Yuhp.”

The matter thus concluded, she hopped off, padded to the bathroom and slammed the door. A moment later she came back wearing a robe and carrying a glass of water.

“So which one are you again?”

“
The Tornado Ashes Club.”

She took a sip. “Which one is that?

“It’s about a guy and his grandmother, and there’s a country singer, and then there are parts in World War II—”

“Right, right. Christian stuff.” She took another sip. “Not
that
Christian, I guess.”

“Um, I guess medium. The editors changed it a lot.”

She pulled her jeans on, but she still wasn’t wearing a shirt. This look I’ve never found flattering on a woman.

“Editors are accountants with red pens,” she said, as she pounded over to the hotel-room desk and picked up the phone.
“Dana. Yah, Pammy McLaughlin here. Listen, do me a favor hon. Have the kitchen send up a fuckload of roast duck.”

Then Pamela pointed at me. “You want something?”

“Uh, I think I’m good.”

“You stickin’ around?”

“Uh, no.”

“Yeah just the roast duck, maybe some mashed yams or sweet potatoes or something. Some kind of legume.” She hung up the phone, informed me she was going to take a shower, and wished me luck.

I put my clothes on and left.

When I got into the elevator to go back down to San Diego BooXpo, I realized my junk was bumping directly into my jeans, so I must’ve left my underwear in Pamela McLaughlin’s room.

Here’s how that happened:

I spent Christmas with Mom and Aunt Evelyn and Margaret. Everybody made a big fuss over the young author. Mom had asked me to write a poem for the occasion. I humored her and scratched out a few lines about “honored turkey, noble bird.” It was a big hit. I was nervous that I’d be called upon to say witty things, but instead everybody assumed the regular things I said were witty. I would ask for the corn, or whatever, and my mom would be, like, “Well! We’ve got to feed the young author’s brain!” and she’d pass the corn. I made up a story that Faulkner always ate the dark meat, because he considered it to be more truly suffused with blood and history.

Then things really started cooking, and next thing I knew I was invited to the San Diego BooXpo.

I was surprised to learn people in San Diego cared enough about books to have an Xpo. I only knew the place from
Simon & Simon
and Sea World.

But the marketing people at Ortolan told me that not only did they have such an Xpo but I was an invited guest. I was supposed to be on a panel called “Of Blogs and Books: Young Authors on Technology and Literature.” Lucy and I had never gotten around to starting a blog for me—luckily nobody had checked—but just being under thirty, I qualified.

This was to be the first stop of a three-stage West Coast promotional tour. I was all for it. Things with Hobart had gotten a bit chilly ever since I freaked him out about Reutical.