Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  “An introduction to who?”

  “To whom,” he corrected, finally finding what he was looking for: a blanket. Then he leaned back in his chair again and shut his eyes and before I could even ask another question, he was already asleep. Deep and instant slumber, like somebody had just closed the lid on the universe’s laptop.

  I’m not sure when I’d stopped breathing or how long I hung there, confused and breathless like a fish that woke up on top of the Empire State Building, I just know that all of a sudden my lungs sucked in a bellyful and whatever trance I was in had finally taken a hike.

  I wanted to wake him. I wanted to continue our conversation. I wanted to have someone—anyone—solve the riddle I understood the least: the riddle of my existence, the riddle of my skin and my mind. But I knew it wouldn’t do any good. So there I was, across from a sleeping prophecy, holding a book that he would carry with him, a book I was supposed to sign, a book that in the front of which I was supposed to say something profound.

  So I did the best I could. I signed what I always sign when I autograph a copy of Hell of a Book. It’s the only thing that makes sense, so I write it, again and again and again, I burn it into every copy of my book that I touch. I just change the name at the beginning:

  Dear Mr. Lord of War:

  The whole world of my life spins under a radiant marquee of fear. Day in and day out it kills me, over and over and over again. Kills me dead, just to restart it all tomorrow. And all I can do about it is tell people that I’m fine.

  “Thanks for reading.”

  Followed by a smiley face.

  Then I thumped the book closed just like I’ve done a thousand times before and placed it gently in his lap and, at some point after that, those little sleep elves got the better of me and put me down for the night.

  When the plane landed the man of the hour stayed asleep. Even when time came to deplane, he slept, and the flight attendants and everyone else let him sleep. I looked back as I walked off the plane, caught one last glimpse of fact or fiction.

  * * *

  —

  That should have been the high point of my trip. Serendipity, some might call it. But, no. Joes like me don’t have no such luck. It still felt to me that very little was going along fine at all. I was still on book tour and so I never knew what city I was in and everyone was still asking me, “So, tell me what your book is about,” and every time I told them, it was becoming more and more difficult to not hear the words that I was saying.

  That’s been my secret to getting through the book tour: I’m able to talk about my book without actually hearing what I’m saying. It’s like watching television with the sound turned off. My lips move and words come out but all I hear are my thoughts about how much I don’t want to be there, and how tired I am of being asked the same questions, and wondering what city I’m in and whether or not the bookstore will have a good turnout when the time comes, and what Sharon is going to say the next time she calls and asks about my book and tells me more about this big Denver interview she can’t seem to stop talking about, and maybe I might actually tell her the truth: that I haven’t actually started the second book.

  All I have is a first sentence: “It was a dark and stormy night . . .”

  And I stole that from someone else.

  But the bigger problem is that now I’ve been on tour for so long that I’m beginning to hear my own voice in interviews. I can hear someone that sounds exactly like me saying that my book is about death. I can hear someone that sounds exactly like me saying that my book is “an attempt to cope.”

  Those two things both sound like a pretty serious rap, so I tune myself out when I can. That’s what the dames were for. I’m no bounder, you see, but sex is a great way to distract yourself from whatever it is that starts breathing down the back of your spine when the 2 a.m. shadows show up and the rest of the world goes quiet and there’s just you and a brain that won’t shut up about all the broken parts of your life as it turns them around, right there in front of you, over and over again like some kind of goddamn insecurity zoetrope.

  In my experience, the only poultice for that particular malady is a heavy dose of sex and alcohol.

  You might not believe me when I tell you this, but I never really had a taste for alcohol until I started this death march of a tour. It’s the truth. I’d drunk maybe five drinks in my whole life before I became a success, before I became a bestseller. Now I’m making up for lost time.

  But I’ll tell you what: one thing that’s making life more bearable is The Kid. He’s around all the time now, like a shadow after Hiroshima. Maybe it’s my seeing his corpse at Kelly’s place or maybe it’s just the night of he and I sitting together and holding our knees and not saying anything to each other. But, whatever the reason, we’re getting along like gangbusters. I’ve learned to not worry about the fact that I’m the only person who can see him. And, most important of all, I stopped seeing the bullet holes in his soot-colored body. It’s like he’s never been shot at all. All of it has passed away.

  People have even stopped talking about the shooting. News travels fast in this world and the dead kid—this particular dead kid, at least—is three news cycles old now, so there’s no one to remind me of how he died, or why he died, or of the outrage I’m supposed to feel about his death.

  Dead kids don’t linger on the brain like they used to.

  Now he’s just The Kid again. So I take him on. I accept him. I see him as he is and I really put in the sweat to see him for who he is. And, folks, let me tell you: he’s a riot.

  The Kid has one hell of an imagination. And I don’t mean that in the way that most folks say it when they talk about kids. Most folks, when they talk about the imagination of kids, what they’re really saying is that kids can imagine monsters or whatever. But that’s not true imagination in my mind. The Kid . . . The Kid’s onto something different.

  When The Kid imagines, he sees people being different than they are. He gets his biggest kick out of looking at people and saying something like “What if she really understood how smart she was?” Or maybe he sees something dire on the news—because everything is dire on the news—and when he sees it, he says something like “Wow! What if we just went there and helped.”

  Revolutionary ideas like that seem small on the surface but, if you ask me, are a hell of a lot more imaginative than any talk of dragons or monsters or any of those usual tropes of what we think kids are supposed to sign up for.

  The Kid loves telling jokes. And not just any jokes, but those bad kind of jokes that only the very young and only the very Dad are able to laugh about. Those jokes where the punch line is the thing that makes you grimace more than it’s the thing that makes you laugh but the bottom line is that you came here to grimace or laugh to begin with. And I’ve always found that those types of jokes aren’t really about the joke itself but about the willingness to embarrass yourself for the sake of the other person. You know the joke is bad. They know the joke is bad. And somehow, you both agree that the telling matters and the listening matters and so you both laugh together at the end because it’s funny in its own particular way.

  When we go into airports The Kid’s always at my side. Sometimes he holds my hand as we go through the chaos of the TSA. Every time we hit the sky he acts like it’s his first time flying even though he’s been with me in every city since Missouri. The trip seems a little more sane now that I see him on my flights. He’s always sitting a few seats in front of me or behind me or maybe across the aisle. And I’ve learned to pretend that I’m dictating into my phone whenever I talk to him so that the people around me don’t start to think that I’m losing my grip on reality, because that’s not what’s happening here at all.

  * * *

  —

  The kid is a bad influence on my already ruined diet when we land in a particular city in Pennsylvania. It’s not far from the city
where they make Hershey’s chocolate and The Kid can’t talk about anything else. It’s like this is the one event he’s been waiting for ever since the beginning. It’s like he planned it all.

  We go to a small college, a stone’s throw away from the factory, and I sell my books, and I shake hands, and I make jokes, and I come across as a mostly sober and relatively competent human being, but all the while, The Kid is in my ear whispering about chocolate, and Twizzlers, and everything else in the Hershey portfolio.

  I keep trying to focus on the job at hand but The Kid won’t be left alone. So, finally, I tell everyone that I’m sick and I catch a cab over to Chocolate World on the outskirts of the Hershey factory and no sooner are we in the door than the kid makes a hard and fast run for the nearest chocolate. He rips it out of the package and shoves it into his mouth and I can’t help but run over and grab him by the hand and hiss, “Stop! We gotta pay for that!”

  “They can’t see me.”

  “That’s not the point, you little bandit. We still got to pay for things.”

  The Kid thinks about this for a moment and nods. The rest of the time, he waits as patiently as he can as we go around filling up a small basket with all of the things we both wanted to eat but never should have decided to eat.

  A little while later, we’re sitting out on a hard concrete bench watching people file into the Heart of Chocolate and stuffing our faces with all of our treats. The sun’s bright and hard; an angry gold eyeball staring down to see what comes next. Because it knows what’s coming next.

  Now and again, people sitting on small concrete benches in this little park area I find myself in stare over at me as though they haven’t seen an author in a three-piece suit shoving his fists into a sack full of candy and, occasionally, talking to someone that only he can see.

  “I still can’t believe you did that.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  “No. You didn’t.”

  The Kid bites through another candy bar. “What difference does it make? Nobody can see me.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Everything around us smells like cocoa. The sun, the sky, the grass, the squirrels dry humping in the bushes with no sense of decency or decorum. Never can trust a horny squirrel.

  “If nobody can see me,” The Kid starts, trying to ignore what’s going on in the bushes, “then what difference does it make what I do? Especially when I’m only hurting myself. That’s what people say about candy, right? They say that it’s bad for you and that when you eat a lot of it you’re only hurting yourself. That’s what my mom said, anyway.”

  I think about this for a moment. I’ve always been a little bit of an anarchist and I can’t deny that there’s more than a little sound logic in what he’s saying. But I also can’t deny that I know it wasn’t right.

  “Just because somebody can’t see you doesn’t mean you’re allowed to do something like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you have to believe you matter, whether someone else sees you or not. Especially for a kid like you. Even Nic Cage knew that.”

  “Nic Cage?”

  “Never mind.”

  A stiff, cocoa-scented breeze blows over the world. Cooling me down for a second as the sugar I’ve been scarfing down starts to hit my bloodstream.

  “What do you mean a kid like me?”

  “I mean that you’re different. You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t. What do you mean?”

  The Kid stops eating his chocolate now and looks at me with sugar-stained lips and a furrowed brow.

  I can’t help but sigh. I mean, is it possible that this kid’s mama and daddy didn’t have The Talk with him?

  “Didn’t your parents ever tell you the truth about who you are?”

  The Kid clucks a laugh. “You sound like you’re about to tell me that I’m a superhero or something.”

  “No,” I say. “Nothing like that. Just trying to say you’ve got to know that you’re different. That the world is different with you in it and that you might not always be treated the exact same way that everybody else has been treated. That’s just something that you’ve got to know.”

  “Why would I be treated differently? Because of my gift?”

  It’s just enough of an unexpected answer to make me wonder why I haven’t thought that it’s the only answer he could have ever mustered. Of course, a kid who’s able to turn invisible might think that the world was going to treat him differently than it treats other kids like him. It’s a beautiful idea and a beautiful thing. And now it’s my time to shatter it.

  “No, Kid. They’re going to treat you differently because of that skin of yours. You can’t tell me that you don’t already know something like that. A kid of your years? You’ve got to come into this game knowing what the rules are and knowing that you can’t ever win it. All you can ever do is try to break even and survive for a little longer than the next person who looks like you. That’s all you can expect. But the thing to know and remember is that you can never be something other than what you are, no matter how much you might want to. You can’t be them. You can only be you. And they’re going to always treat you differently than they treat themselves. They won’t ever know about it—at least, most of them won’t. Most of them will think that everything is okay and that you’re being treated well enough and that everything is beautiful. Because, I guess for them, all they can imagine is a world in which things are fair and beautiful because, after all, they’ve always been treated fairly and beautifully. History has always been kind to them.”

  I’m getting on a roll now and it feels good. It’s rare that I really know where I’m going with anything but right now I know and I like where this train ride is going. I still can’t believe this kid’s mother and old man never took the time to lay out the road map of the world for him. Or maybe they did and it just never went across properly. I’ve seen that happen before. I’ve seen those times when people try to let their kids know what’s happening in the real world but the kids are so blinded by Walt Disney and DreamWorks and a thousand other storytellers that can’t relate to their reality. You see, the thing those fablers don’t get is that certain kids don’t get a fair chance to chase the dream. The world murders them first. Murders them, but fails to kill them. So these kids, they die young and grow a little more mad every day from then on out.

  “But the thing that you need to know,” I tell this soon-to-be Mad Kid, “is that history has given you a specific role in this world. A specific burden to bear. And it’s not the prettiest one. And the sooner you learn that the rules are different for you, the better off you’ll be. But I can also understand why your folks never sat you down and had this heart-to-heart with you. The fact of the matter is that if I had a bambino of my own, I might hesitate to strip down illusion and build up the reality that’s bleak, and painful, and full of woe and sadness. A parent sees a child come into the world and all they want is for that child to have everything the world has to offer. But for kids like you—and for the kid I used to be—all that the world has is a collection of traps and walls. If the traps don’t get you the walls will keep you away from all of the things that you’ve been taught you’re owed. And that’s a hard thing to lay on a kid. It’s hard to stand there and tell your children that they’re always going to have to be afraid of the police. It’s hard to say to them: if a policeman stops you, you should trust them, but you should also keep your hands where they can see them and you should never ever talk back to them and you should never do anything that could be seen as a sudden move and even if you do all of that, there’s still no guarantee that you’ll come out of it alive. The cop could shoot you right then and there and you’ll die without ever knowing what you did wrong.”

  I take a second to look up at the sun. I stare straight into it, just like you’re not supposed to do. It hurts
, but I keep doing it, like hurting myself will somehow fix something. It’s the exact thing I told The Kid not to do and here I am doing it.

  Sounds about right.

  “It’s hard to tell a child that being who they are, being born with a certain skin, is an act of counterculture in and of itself,” I tell The Kid without ever taking my eyes away from the sun. I wallow in the pain and continue paying my pain forward. “It’s hard,” I say, “to tell a child, ‘You’re the mirror that nobody wants to see. And, because of it, you and everyone like you is born excommunicated. A whole nation, unwanted and unsought, born into exile in the belly of another nation. Americae excommunicatus! Always have been.’

  “What kind of thing is that to tell a kid? What kind of moment does it create? What does it take away? What does it leave them with?”

  Finally, I blink.

  But the sun is still there.

  The pain is still there, even though nobody else can see it or feel it but me.

  I can hardly process it all. I can still remember when my folks had this talk—The Talk—with me. The old man was on the edge of breaking into tears and my mother was on the edge of rage. They both, in their own way, felt like they’d failed me. Maybe they thought that they could do something about the world before I got old enough to be affected by it. But they had lied to themselves. They had ignored the fact that from the moment I came out with all of this black skin, the world was already turning its blades against me. The traps had already been set. The walls had already been built. The schools. The prisons. The self-hatred. It had all been done before I ever showed up and my parents had the audacity to think that they stood a chance against any of it. They dared to believe that they could change anything.

  Pipe dream of a pair of Mad Kids if I ever seen one. World proved them wrong. And they went on living in madness, eventually becoming mysteries unto themselves. Trying to figure out why the world wouldn’t let them be who they were. Trying to figure out why the world wouldn’t listen to them, wouldn’t see them. Trying to figure out whatever happened to the soul they used to be before the world drove them mad.