KW09b:Chickens (3 page)

The chihuahua licked Bert’s face.

Then the rooster crowed as lustily as ever from someplace not very far away, a backyard or a different alley.

Ted tilted his head to gauge the direction from which the cry had come. He shrugged and it could be seen that there were bits of leaf and twig clinging to his jockey shorts and mixed in with his chest hair. Resignedly he said, “
We didn’t scare him far. He’ll probably come back sometime. Just a question of when.”

Surprised by his own bravado, Bert said, “And we’ll be ready for him when he does.”

“Yup, we will,” said Ted, and he led the way back between the fences. The distance seemed much shorter now, the footing not so treacherous, the dimness not so blinding. In moments they were back on the driveway, then through the compound gate and onto the white gravel pathway that gleamed softly even in the dark, and Bert was headed back to the cottage that was already feeling a great deal more like home.

Laurence Shames has been a New York City taxi driver, lounge singer, furniture mover, lifeguard, dishwasher, gym teacher, and shoe salesman. Having failed to distinguish himself in any of those professions, he turned to writing full-time in 1976 and has not done an honest day's work since.

His basic laziness notwithstanding, Shames has published twenty books and hundreds of magazine articles and essays. Best known for his critically acclaimed series of Key West novels, he has also authored non-fiction and enjoyed considerable though largely secret success as a collaborator and ghostwriter. Shames has penned four New York Times bestsellers. These have appeared on four different lists, under four different names, none of them his own. This might be a record.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1951, to chain-smoking parents of modest means but flamboyant emotions, Shames graduated summa cum laude from NYU in 1972 and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. His education has had no influence whatsoever on his later life or career.

It was on an Italian beach in the summer of 1970 that Shames first heard the sacred call of the writer's vocation. Lonely and poor, hungry and thirsty, he'd wandered into a seaside trattoria, where he noticed a couple tucking into a big platter of fritto misto. The man was nothing much to look at but the woman was really beautiful. She was perfectly tan and had a very fine-gauge gold chain looped around her bare tummy. The couple was sharing a liter of white wine; condensation beaded the carafe. Eye contact was made; the couple turned out to be Americans. The man wiped olive oil from his rather sensual lips and introduced himself as a writer. Shames knew in that moment that he would be one too.

He began writing stories and longer things he thought of as novels. He couldn't sell them.

By 1979 he'd somehow become a journalist and was soon publishing in top-shelf magazines like Playboy, Outside, Saturday Review, and Vanity Fair. In 1982, Shames was named Ethics columnist of Esquire, and also made a contributing editor to that magazine.

By 1986 he was writing non-fiction books whose critical if not commercial success first established Shames' credentials as a collaborator/ghostwriter. His 1991 national bestseller, BOSS OF BOSSES, written with two FBI agents, got him thinking about the Mafia. It also bought him a ticket out of New York and a sweet little house in Key West, where he finally got back to Plan A: writing fiction.

Through the 1990s, he published eight Key West novels. In 2013, after a hiatus of a dozen years, he brought out his ninth, SHOT ON LOCATION.

CHICKENS, featuring the beloved character Bert the Shirt, is the first in a projected series of stories set in the Southernmost City.

Find out more about Laurence Shames at
http://www.laurenceshames.com

Fiction—

Shot on Location

The Naked Detective

Welcome to Paradise

Mangrove Squeeze

Virgin Heat

Tropical Depression

Sunburn

Scavenger Reef

Florida Straits

Nonfiction—

Not Fade Away (with Peter Barton)

The Hunger for More

The Big Time