by H. M. Mann
He’s wearing such a small suit, though, Johnny thought. There couldn’t be more than another five bucks in there at the most.
“Adios, Hector,” Randy lisped.
Johnny slipped the twenty into an air vent on the passenger side of the Vega, turned the vent away from his face, and turned his heater on high. By the time he arrived at the Quick-E Mart, he was confident that the heat had fried any randy smegma on the bill.
He held up five fingers to Gloria, she turned on the pump, and he pumped the gas. We’re like clockwork, Gloria and me, Johnny thought. I wish the rest of my world were as efficient and, well, as pretty as Gloria.
Johnny bypassed the empty counter and went into the men’s room to wash his hands. He sang “Happy Birthday to Me” four times as he lathered and scrubbed with the pink GOJO soap.
At the counter, he counted out five crisp ones from his fanny pack.
“Doing any writing tonight, Johnny?” Gloria asked.
“Too busy,” Johnny said, staring at his shoes. Go ahead. Say something else for a change. You’re the only one in line, and the store is empty. “I, um, I have been working on a new novel at home, though.”
“What’s it about?” Gloria asked.
Johnny allowed his eyes to wander up Gloria’s arm to her face, focusing on a space to the right of her nose. That certainly looks smooth and soft. “Well, it’s a romance.”
“Yeah?” Gloria smiled. “You’re writing a romance?”
And now Gloria is batting her eyelashes at me. Stupid pollen. It gets trapped here by the Appalachians and the Blue Ridge Mountains. “Um, yes.” He dropped his eyes, tapped the counter with his fingers, and turned to go.
“Oh, I love reading romances,” Gloria said.
Johnny turned back to Gloria, smiling at his old friend, the unsmiling orange counter.
“I’d like to read it sometime, Johnny,” Gloria said.
Do I need a reader at this point in my novel’s development? Or should I wait until I’ve finished it? I guess it couldn’t hurt to have a fresh set of eyes now to steer me in the right direction. “Um, I can print out some pages for you.”
“Tomorrow?” Gloria asked.
I can’t tell her that I only have the first page, although it is my best writing ever. “Oh, I’ll have something more substantial for you to read on …Wednesday.” He turned again to leave.
“Johnny?”
He turned back.
Johnny was getting a workout tonight.
“You forgot your sucker.”
Johnny watched Gloria’s interesting left hand slide a cherry Dum-Dum across the counter, and for the first time he noticed Gloria’s left hand was ring-less. “Thanks, um, Gloria.”
“See you Wednesday night, Johnny,” Gloria said.
Johnny nodded because he was glad that Gloria didn’t turn her every sentence into a question like most convenience store clerks in Roanoke. “See you Wednesday, um, Gloria.”
Later that night when he had counted down his take, he found he had actually made over $40 in tips for the first time in his life.
“Is about time you had a good night,” Hector said. “Is because you not”—he wiggled his fingers in the air—“playing with your typewriter while you drive. You are driving, and that is making you the money. You see what happens when you do one job at a time?”
Johnny nodded, actually eager to sweep, mop, and get home to his real job.
“Hey, I put a coupon in the paper for Wednesday,” Hector said. “Two for one special on everything. I must get more business for the holidays.”
Johnny cursed Hector in his head. Of all the nights! “Why Wednesday?”
“Is my slowest night,” Hector said. “You should know this. You will need to get lots of gas before your shift, okay?”
The phone rang, and Hector jumped.
“You answer,” Hector said, his eyebrows curled back into his forehead. “Man named Randy call all night, make me crazy. Ask me if I like his bathing suit. Ask me if I want a bigger tip. Wants me to come over to drink wine and get a backrub. How does he know I am from Guatemala?”
Johnny looked at the clock and smiled. “We’re closed, aren’t we?”
Hector disconnected the phone from the wall. “Yes, yes. No more Randy.”
Johnny swept and mopped in record time, clocking out before one.
“You have a date?” Hector asked, inspecting the floor.
“No,” Johnny said. “I’m going home to write.”
“You will never get the girls with the writing, Johnny,” Hector said. “That is easy work. You must get your hands dirty. Hard work gets the girls.”
Johnny didn’t respond. He didn’t have to get “the girls.”
He only had to impress one.
And her name, which he had finally said out loud a few hours ago, was Gloria.
11
I’ve made all sorts of breakthroughs tonight, Johnny thought. I hope it carries over into my writing.
As usual, Johnny was dead wrong.
Once in front of the laptop, and after whisking cracker crumbs from the keys, Johnny hit the literary jet stream, his mind racing faster than his fingers could type.
Gloria is going to love this!
Then Cat collapsed like a fainting goat, the kind they show on YouTube and those amazing video shows, and although it doesn’t seem to hurt the goats, it sure as crap looks as if it does because they hit the ground hard. And that’s funny and we bust a gut laughing when we shouldn’t because the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would let vultures eat our livers for eternity if it could.
That’s how Cat collapsed.
Despite Gunn’s copious blood loss, he was able to carry Cat 3,434 feet to safety and a waiting ambulance, the teenaged, pimple-faced volunteer EMT’s too chicken to park near the blazing Geo Storm for fear of actually doing their unpaid jobs and becoming unpaid heroes.
“My hero,” Cat whispered as she passed out colder than the iceberg that sank the Titanic.
Johnny knew he had to use lots of similes and metaphors so the critics would take him seriously as a writer.
Colder than … the toilet seat under Marie Antoinette? No, too historical.
Colder than Dante’s vision of medieval hell in Canto XXXIV of Inferno? No, too literary.
Wait.
Cat has been on fire. How can she pass out cold?
Whatever. I’ll leave it in. It will be a paradox. Critics love paradoxes.
Now, why had Gunn been speeding recklessly through town in the first place?
Johnny also knew that he had to insert copious amounts of back-story here and there to explain stuff the reader might have missed or might be wondering about—or not—because it was all part of the romance writing game.
Earlier, Gunn had been racing to catch an F-16 Fighting Falcon at the Roanoke Regional Airport for a secret CIA mission to the Middle East to stamp out thought, kick up sand, let certain companies formerly run by Republican vice presidents get rich, and assassinate Scorpion, leader of the international terrorist group, Al-á-Mode. Scorpion had bad breath and looked through eyes the color of swamp water. Scorpion also had a hot sister who looked like Angelina Jolie, liked to punt defenseless kittens, and enjoyed selling orphaned children to the circus.
Johnny knew he had written irrelevant copy, but he decided that he needed to fill space to give his book more depth.
The ambulance took the romantic pair three blocks down Main Street to First Street, two blocks east on Magnolia Avenue, and a hard right next to the post office and a seriously obese Dachshund at Randolph Street before waiting briefly for a gas-guzzling Hummer to get the heck out of the way, learn to drive, ya idiot!!—same to you, ya planet polluter!—and screeched to a halt in front of the emergency room entrance at Graves Memorial, named for Podunk’s first settlers, who came running not from religious persecution but from an angry mob outside a privy that they had set on fire as a prank in Camden, New Jersey.
Joh
nny knew he had to give readers excruciatingly precise directions in romance novels so he wouldn’t lose them. But why did Microsoft Word underline that section in green? Johnny thought. It flows okay to me. Microsoft Word just cannot keep up with me.
Once inside the ER, doctors and nurses, all of them wearing makeup and generally looking young, hot, and foreign, rolled Cat and Gunn side-by-side on gurneys into the same trauma room since they had similar, non-life-threatening wounds. Tubes snaked from their veins in all directions, and their bill was going to be a whopper.
After stitching them up, all the doctors and nurses walked out to talk, flirt, do Sudoku puzzles, fill out malpractice reports, steal Oxycontin, and eat donuts and pizza, thereby leaving Gunn and Cat completely alone.
Their smoke-ravaged eyes met, her eyes matching her still smoking red hair. Gunn burned for her, and Cat burned for him. They burned for each other.
She had been on fire, after all, only an hour ago.
“Where are the doctors and nurses?” Cat asked wonderingly.
“Nowhere,” Gunn said warily. “And that’s why we need national health care in this country. They bring you in, they make you sign papers, you sit in the waiting area with a thousand other sick and disease-infested people including people who aren’t really sick and just have the blahs or like to hang out watching other people in pain, and the nurses might call you back before next month or whenever they good and well please. Then all they do is take your blood pressure and pulse, declare you alive, and send you on your way with a huge bill you have to take out a second mortgage to pay. It’s a disgrace, I tell you!”
Johnny knew it was always good to sermonize in a romance novel since it added a serious tone.
Their eyes met again, and then they did some hot, smoking, crazy, burning hot as smoldering Geo Storm necking, the monitors flashing their lights in perfect rhythm to their kissing.
Afterwards, Gunn asked her, “What is your name?”
“Cat,” she purred.
“Me … ow,” he said with a hiss. “Move in with me,” he said movingly.
“OK,” she said shortly.
Johnny knew he had to use as many words ending in –ly as he could. He knew that they really, really moved the story along really quickly, hurriedly, rapidly, and expeditiously.
They moved in together that very night, even though no major moving company would be open until 8 AM, and it was a virtual impossibility to get a U-Haul on weekends when most people moved because they didn’t want to take a day off from their jobs, and they always lie about how much stuff you can fit in one of those trucks anyway because “can contain three rooms” really means “Can contain three closets and two empty shoeboxes.”
Cat complimented Gunn on his central vacuuming, his gourmet kitchen, his Cuisinart, his indoor/outdoor pool, his robot vacuum that circled the living room, and his collection of rare embroidered tea cozies.
Every manly man, Johnny thought, has to have a hobby to show off his soft side.
“They were instantly in love,” he typed.
And how does that feel? How in the world should I know? He shrugged and continued to type.
They felt love and full of love from the bottoms of their feet to the tops of their craniums. They felt love from their ingrown toenails to their dandruff. They felt love from their corns and bunions to the tops of their split ends.
They felt, obviously, a lot of freaking love.
And they shared their love all night, loving everything about each other and necking continuously without hydration until the Vicodin kicked in.
After four hours of intense tonsil hockey, they each lay back on Gunn’s enormous black leather sectional sofa to think thoughtful thoughts.
Cat thought thoughtless thoughts. Did I turn off my curling iron this morning? I hope I did. I forgot to check. I have no memory at all. Did I turn off my curling iron this morning? Wait. I thought about that already. I think I thought about it. The economy really sucks! What is a recession anyway? If a recession is bad, is a procession good? Why don’t they ever say we’re in a procession? I need to wax my legs again. My legs could sand a redwood tree down to a toothpick. I wonder how high this ceiling is. This is a nice sofa. I’ll bet Gunn rotates his cushions every three months like you’re supposed to do. I never do it. The ants eating the crumbs under my couch cushions won’t let me because they claim that they were subletting the apartment first. I hope he likes dogs. Did I eat today? That wench of a nurse gave me dirty looks. I’ll bet she wanted to hook up with Gunn, too. And why was she wearing makeup? It must have been because of all the lights and cameras. She didn’t even speak English. Did I pay my electric bill this month? I hope I didn’t and they cut me off. Then I won’t have to worry whether or not I turned off my curling iron.
Gunn tried in vain to focus on Cat. She is so hot. I’m hungry. Her skin is so smooth and soft! I’m very hungry. There is some leftover tuna casserole in the fridge. I like her stamina. Wish I had some Gatorade. I am so dehydrated. I can reheat that casserole. It might taste just as good the second time. Soup! I could eat some chicken noodle soup with some crackers. I hope they’re not stale. Once I ate a cracker that bent to a ninety-degree angle before it broke.
They fell asleep in each other’s arms until Gunn rolled over and nearly suffocated Cat with his chest hair.
They awoke on the couch, which smelled of burning lust. They woke up sticky and smelling like musty damp lettuce and mildewed cabbage, their body odor intermingling and forming a mist of lust that floated from the couch to steam up the picture window overlooking the meadows, streams, mountains, and forests of Gunn’s estate.
The lust mist obscured the Thornhill Mountains, upon which, in 1863, Colonel Ornes “The Bearded One” Jordan led an expedition in search of the renegade rebel Samuel Thompson, who, as it turned out, was really a dandy chess player from Amherst who dreamed of playing football in the NFL, which, as we all know, didn’t exist in 1863—but it should have. Maybe there wouldn’t have been a Civil War if professional football had been around to give folks the chance to vent, paint their faces, and wear pig noses and dresses. They could have had the first Blue vs. Gray game and gotten the war over and done with in sixty minutes, thereby ridding the world of 140+ years of Civil War books including nearly a thousand pages of Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend, Gone With the Wind, and The Red Badge of Courage.
Hey now, fingers, Johnny thought. I liked The Red Badge of Courage. But, well, it’s only a novel. What readers in their right minds don’t know that? They couldn’t possibly write me hate mail for disrespecting these books, could they?
Johnny took a sip of tea and rested. He knew he had to include lots of irrelevant landscapes and pointless historical information. It was part of the romantic novel “code,” but it certainly was hard work. He stood, stretched, did several jumping jacks, massaged his neck, and got back to work.
Later, Gunn bought Cat a new nose to replace her old nose that jingled like loose change because of the exploding airbag in her Geo Storm. He bought her one red contact to cover one of her green eyes so she could look festive and blend in at Christmas.
Cat bought Gunn a new blade for his blender and one cufflink because she was dirt poor and had gone barefoot until she was seventeen. She was so poor she had to lay away clothes at K-Mart for several years, and by the time she had finished paying for them, her clothes had gone out of style everywhere except in Amish country. She was so poor she couldn’t afford to fix the horn on her Geo Storm, yelling, “Honk!” at other drivers instead. She was so poor she had to use her last scented candle to heat her apartment. She had shivered a lot, but she had cinnamon apple-smelling goose bumps.
They talked of marriage. They talked of kids. They talked of a lifetime together cuddling morning, noon, night, and sometimes during the between times like when the sun is just coming up or going down or when there’s an eclipse and you really can’t tell day from night.
Gunn wanted twelve kids.
Cat wanted fifteen.
“We’ll need more bathrooms,” Gunn said often in a needy manner, and Cat flushed whenever he said it.
He was her everything, and she was his everything, and they shared everything together all day long and all night long, and neither had to go to work because of The Settlement. His lawyers at Gregg, Muse, and Berger had seen to that.
Johnny yawned. He knew he needed to add some drama and some tension, but how could he do that at this time of the morning? He thought back to an incident involving a little dog that had once bitten him on the ankle while he was on a delivery. “Stupid Pomeranian,” he said aloud. “I should sic my mice on you.”
When Cat suggested getting a Pomeranian, Gunn put his foot down hard and sprained his right pinkie toe. “No dogs!” he yelled doggedly.
“You don’t mean that, do you?” she asked meaningfully.
“I say what I mean and I mean what I say!” he hollered redundantly.
“Do you mean that, too?” she asked repetitively.
Johnny felt the scene going nowhere, but because he was on a literary roll, he didn’t want to stop. What line do other romance writers use when their scenes are going nowhere?
Johnny smiled.
“We need to talk,” Gunn said talkatively.
“Isn’t that what we’re doing?” she asked questioningly.
“Yes, we are talking, but that’s not what I thought I was saying when I said, ‘We need to talk,’” he said thoughtfully.
“So it’s serious,” she said seriously. Her voice caught like a sleeve on a doorknob.
Johnny rested his fingers. “A sleeve on a rusty nail?” he whispered. “A sleeve on a hangnail? I must build more tension …”
He deleted the previous two sentences and continued.
“So it’s really, really serious,” she said really, really seriously. Her voice caught like a sleeve on a rusty hangnail.
“Yes, it’s serious, so very, very, very, very, very serious,” he said very often.
“Oh.” Her voice caught again, but this time it caught like a knitted scarf thrown carelessly into the spokes of a speeding 1959 FLH Custom Harley Davidson motorcycle, unseating the rider, and creating a human skid mark 1,034 feet long in the far left lane of Interstate 81.
