And see what you think of the Iced Out preview at the end, but first—I have to tell you all about the people who helped make Nobody’s Hero possible.
Thanks again,
Acknowledgements
So there are some things I know about, and many things I don’t, and I can’t imagine a subject I once knew less about than music and recording. Also, I’m no kind of poet. As a result, what I’d hoped to be an isolated experience of writing a novel turned into quite an adventure and made me one of those people with three pages of acknowledgments. I figured the best way to do this part was in order of appearance, so we’ll start with …
The irreplaceable Mike Potter, for posting your resume online where I could find it and taking that internship at the Late Show so I could ask you a whole bunch of questions later. I’d have been lost without you.
The entertaining Brad Miser, who wrote The Absolute Beginners Guide to iPod and iTunes, so helpful for a broke writer who hadn’t yet obtained her first iPod but needed one in the story. Thanks for hazarding a guess about those iTunes rankings.
The obstinate Brad Schoenfeld, for your relentless insistence on the difficulty in appearing on a national talk show. Thanks for not letting me get away with it — you made everything better in the process.
The generous Dr. Rachel Herz, for sending me a copy of her article, Gender differences in response to physical and social signals involved in human mate selection: The importance of smell for women. Which was quite a mouthful and perhaps the first academic study I’d read in, well, maybe ever. I hope I got most of the gist right. Her book, The Scent of Desire, was published later, and it’s a great read about Carolyn’s favorite subject.
The well-traveled Tom Brosnahan, of NewEnglandTravelPlanner.com for helping with the Sherry-Netherland, which I personally could not afford to walk into.
The supremely talented Blueprint, for such a hilarious song, and for being so openhanded with the words.
The amazing Luke Walker, for your middle- school- aged self’s insight into the general Simpsons plot line, even with different verb usage, and even though it was so long ago you don’t remember. (I remembered!)
The knowledgeable Adam Chromy, of Artists & Artisans, for giving me a phone call packed with expertise about literary agents, speaking contracts, and big-time authors. If you ever want to reconsider being my agent, Adam, I’ll reconsider letting you.
The foresighted Steve Engle, for the pictures of the Tavern on the Green, but mostly for getting off that late plane out of Islip and making Delta pay for a cab from Cincy — and then sharing it home to Columbus. Yeah, it was a ridiculous night and you made it so much better.
The well-hydrated Teri Flinn, for tromping all over Manhattan in 98 degree heat, standing on the Gapstow Bridge while I wandered around Central Park to see how far away I could see you from, suffering the YMCA and their stinginess with the towels, climbing to the top of Yankee Stadium even though your first full sentence was “Let’s go, Mets!” and helping me hunt down the Burger Joint. You are the best friend ever.
The affiliating Peter S. Scholtes at CityPages.com, for getting me the contact info for Eyedea.
The incomparable Eyedea — for responding! A year later! And being so great about me planting a fictional character in your very real history. Ironic — if it wasn’t for Rick, I might not have found you. And if not for you, I know I’d have never really found him.
The luminescent Lennox … it’s probably about time for some gratitude if you’re still here, Chief. Thanks for caring about this, for rewriting the rhymes or making me do it when they sucked, for letting me in the studio while you were working, for coming up with Guillotine’s name and even taking a poll of the guys in the basement to make sure it wasn’t taken … and for still being the best rapper I know. I’m waiting for the next album. And I’m growing old waiting for it.
The hospitable Patty & Mike Bodanza, for letting me stay with them so that I had a home base from which to get hopelessly lost in Cleveland. And Anthony, thanks for giving up your room for me.
Finally, the benevolent George Gates of Commercial Recording Studios in Cleveland. If anyone could have been more excellent at explaining things I knew nothing about, I can’t imagine how. Thanks so much for your time and your willingness to help and for sharing your beautiful studio with me for an afternoon.
More books I read that made a big difference:
Jeff Chang wrote an incredible book called Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, which filled in everything I never knew was happening while I was growing up.
M. William Krasilovsky and Sidney Shemel wrote This Business of Music, a textbook that appeared on my branch library shelf right when I was wondering how I was ever going to understand anything about the music business. Serendipity.
Ruby K. Payne wrote Crossing the Tracks for Love which helped me understand why things were going to go wrong in this relationship.
Some people helped with the whole ride, instead of just pieces:
Becca, Chris, Candace & Julianna, thanks for your early reads and opinions.
Daniel Price, the author of Slick, a novel that proves unmatched talent doesn’t always make you rich and famous, for taking the time to read an early draft and offering so much encouragement. It meant the world coming from you.
And to Shaunta Grimes, you know as well as I do that this wouldn’t have been a readable novel without you. No one on earth deserves the effort you put into making this story work, and I will always be so grateful.
Coming Soon
Iced Out
a new novel by Melanie Harvey
to be released Thanksgiving, 2011
Enjoy the preview…
Prologue
Marcy Mahoney pushed her two-days-past-due-date body out of her office chair. Her back was aching and she needed a change of position. She glanced at her boss’s schedule, and then the clock.
“Oh, baby,” she murmured, patting her belly. “If you weren’t so late, I wouldn’t have to see the great and annoying Oz again.”
It wasn’t going to be a pleasant meeting, either. Franklin, her boss, CPA and money manager to many annoying L.A. types, was going to tell Oz that he would be completely bankrupt within three months, with no hope of deliverance.
Marcy patted her belly again and whispered, “On the other hand, baby girl, I’d have hated to miss this one.”
Franklin came out of his office, running a hand through disheveled hair, and Marcy felt guilty for glorying in Oz’s downfall. Oz would blame Franklin, not his own ridiculous expenditures.
“Is he here?” Franklin asked.
Marcy peered out the window down to the front driveway, three stories below. The Hummer Limo was idling in front of the building’s doors.
“Yes, he is.” She sighed, melodramatically. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
Franklin shot her a stricken look. “Oh, Marcy. Would you please get me…”
He hesitated, as he had for the past month, unwilling to ask her for anything in her advanced state of largess.
“A shot of tequila?” Marcy finished. “Or maybe you really need to toke up for this one?”
“Marcy!”
She grinned, because Franklin still saw her as an innocent Iowa girl. He actually seemed confused when she got knocked up last year, albeit by her husband.
Marcy wasn’t innocent, but she longed for Iowa. However, she’d lacked the foresight to say no to a philosophy professor’s proposal of marriage. Lucky to get a job at all, Mark Mahoney, her otherwise amazing husband, had received tenure in, of all the God-forsaken places, Los Angeles. Marcy sighed and patted her belly. Her baby girl was going to grow up in California. Marcy’s mother was practically in mourning.
At least Mark had been promoted to department chair so she wouldn’t have to work after their baby was born. And deal with people like Oz anymore.
She fetched Franklin a glass of ice water and two Excedrin tablets.
“It’s going to be okay,” she told him. “No matter what he says, it’s not your fault he can’t sell any more of his ostentatious jewelry to the hip-hop stars. We’re in a recession.”
Franklin didn’t seem consoled. Then, Oz arrived. And to both Marcy and Franklin’s surprise, he had a plan. It was an insane plan, involving museums and treating his silly jewelry like it was a fine art exhibit, but it would bring publicity nonetheless, and at the very least, Oz didn’t take Franklin’s head off over the looming bankruptcy.
In fact, Oz didn’t believe the bankruptcy would ever happen.
Marcy was certain he was as arrogant as he’d ever been. But she would be home singing lullabies when Oz finally drowned in his own debt.
Art museums, she thought. Oh, baby.
Chapter One
If he’d known what was about to go down, Henry Clark wouldn’t have bothered with the garbage disposal that morning. But he hadn’t know, he couldn’t. And besides, would anyone have been helped if he’d ignored the broken disposal?
Mrs. Cotton stood in the kitchen, watching him. “Can you fix it?”
Henry had been raised with his older brother by a single mom in apartment complexes that were ninety-nine percent black and a hundred percent poor. When something broke, you called the landlord. He ignored you, and you learned to live with it.
“Mmm,” Henry said. He shifted, caught an acidic whiff from a bottle under the sink, and something light and fuzzy spun through his brain.
He heard her footsteps leaving the kitchen and immediately climbed out of the cabinet to flip the switch over the sink. Not even a hum. It was his first disposal, and he’d checked the circuit breaker, which exhausted his ideas of how to fix it.
By the time he returned to the cabinet, her footsteps sounded on the tile again, but this time, the light cast a shadow near the bottom of the disposal. He twisted his neck, saw a hole, and in the hole, a button. A red button. He thought of Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, don’t ever, ever push the red button. Henry pushed it.
Nothing happened.
“I hate to bother you,” she said.
“It’s no problem, Ma’am,” he said, even though the disposal was becoming a huge problem.
“I have something else to show you, too.”
Henry crawled out, seeing as all he could do under the sink was get high from the furniture polish. Because it was there, he flipped the switch again. The disposal ground to life.
“You did it!”
Henry often wondered if her enthusiasm at his success meant she was as surprised as he was. He shut off the disposal and stretched his thirty-five year old back. “That other thing?”
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Cotton said, a thin, blue-veined hand pressed to her paper-white cheek. “It wasn’t so bad earlier, but I thought I’d better check on it while you were here.”
She held herself perfectly straight as she led the way down the short hallway. When he first met her, he’d thought she was in her sixties. He’d been short by a decade. Power walking, she’d told him, and lots of vegetables—did Henry eat vegetables?
Henry did, and over the past four years found himself doing the heavy lifting in a backyard garden to produce them. He’d never taken free food for granted.
“It only started dripping a week ago,” she said. “Not much, you see, so I didn’t want to trouble you, but then just this morning it started…well, you should look.”
Mrs. Cotton turned into a yellow bathroom filled with fluffy rugs and towels. Henry glanced at the sink because he thought he heard water running, but the tap was off. She pulled back the seashell print shower curtain and stepped aside. Water streamed from the hot and cold water faucets, from the knob that switched the water from the shower to the tub spout, and from the showerhead itself.
“Oh.” Henry knelt and twisted the faucets. The torrent didn’t slow. “That is a problem.”
The sort of problem Henry would call the landlord about.
Unfortunately, he was the landlord. And this was no Section 8 apartment complex.
“Can you fix it?”
“Oh. Sure. I’m gonna need to, um …” Henry examined the tiled wall. He’d never changed shower faucets before, but now that he considered them, they seemed pretty well sealed up in there. And sadly lacking red buttons to push. “Yeah … um…”
Mrs. Cotton glanced at the hammer and screwdriver in his hand. “I guess you’ll need more tools,” she said.
“That’s right,” Henry agreed quickly. “I will definitely need more tools.”
* * *
Henry crossed the front porch he shared with Mrs. Cotton and pushed open his own front door, praying the Home Improvement Encyclopedia would rescue him just one more time.
“Oh, good. You’re home.”
Henry dealt with Neil Daughtry’s cheerful greeting the same way he dealt with Neil in general: he ignored him and crossed to the bookshelf.
Neil perched on the arm of the faded couch in the living room. It was Henry’s living room, despite Neil’s six month residence. Sort of like the Iraq war, he’d let Neil sleep there a couple nights, without a firm exit strategy in place.
“I found something,” Neil said.
“The meaning of life?”
“Better.”
Henry flipped the heavy book open to “Showers,” which explained how to build a shower, but failed to explain how to fix one once it was built. He turned to “Faucets,” momentarily energized by the heading Repairing a Faucet, but the few short paragraphs neglected to tell him how to access the faucet to repair it. It wasn’t technically false advertising, but he felt irritated nonetheless.
Neil remained where he was, his right knee jiggling, probably impatient for Henry to ask what was better than the meaning of life. Henry didn’t ask. If Neil said he found something, he meant he found something that wasn’t nailed down. Too tightly.
When Henry closed the book, Neil said, “You’re not gonna believe it.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Henry replied. “I’m fairly gullible.”
Neil’s brow wrinkled as he accessed his vocabulary. Henry returned the worthless book to the shelf and reached for another in his ever-growing collection.
“It’s platinum,” Neil said.
“Mmm hmm.”
“I’m serious, Henry. Real platinum jewelry, just sitting there.”
“And nobody owns it?”
Neil shrugged. “Well, somebody owns it.”
“Not you, though.”
Neil shrugged again. “Not yet.”
“Mmm hmm.” Henry flipped the pages and found what he was looking for.
“They’re at the art museum downtown. Some famous jewelry artist, his stuff, just sitting out there in the open. Only one guy really watching them, too.”
“So why not pick up a few and walk out with them?”
“Exactly.”
“Well,” Henry said. “I think you should go for it.”
“Really?”
“Like you said, it’s just sitting there.”
“Some kind of display. Where people can try it on, pretend they’re rap stars.”
“Seems like they’re asking for it then.”
Neil smacked his palm down on the coffee table. “Exactly!”
The first time Henry met Neil, he’d thought that, with any luck, Neil might be a not-too-bigoted white guy. He’d learned in hours that Neil was a not-too-bright white guy, and annoying to boot. Mostly because of this word—Exactly!— that he used to agree with things Henry didn’t mean the least bit seriously.
“Well, good luck with that then,” Henry said, and returned to his studying. From what this book’s more helpful diagram showed, a shower would have an access panel in the room behind it. He stuck an old envelope in the book to hold his place and shooed Neil out of the way to check into this. Behind Henry’s bathroom was his second bedroom, which he used for storage. All the space in the hundred year old house was full of apartments, two up, and
two down.
“So I talked to Freddy about it,” Neil said.
Henry sucked in a breath. “Freddy Cabrese?”
Neil nodded.
“You know Freddy Cabrese?”
Neil shrugged. “Sure.”
Freddy was, among many other things, a fence who Henry hadn’t seen in more than ten years. And he wasn’t going to see him, either. Henry exhaled a long breath before he moved some boxes so he could stick his head inside the closet. Not that he expected his closet to match the book’s diagram.
“Freddy said he would be interested,” Neil said. “Definitely interested.”
But there really was a piece of plywood nailed to the closet wall. The plywood came off easily with the claw hammer, and he sat back on his heels to examine the pipes and his diagram. Looked pretty much the same, so he was fairly confident he wouldn’t embarrass himself looking for some non-existent hole in Mrs. Cotton’s closet.
The cot Neil had moved in along with his body gave a loud squeak when Neil sat down. He’d made some noise about how Henry could at least move the lawnmower out of here, but Henry wasn’t trying to make him comfortable. If Neil wanted more space, it was available for rent all over the city.
“Freddy thinks it’s definitely a two—but probably three—person job.”
Henry checked the diagram again. There would be the obligatory trip to Home Depot, but he’d known that was coming. “You should talk to Bass.”
“Bass?” Neil asked. “You mean Mickey Basswood?”
Nobody's Hero Page 40
