Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  I flinch like I’ve been bitten by something.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, remembering that it’s easier to talk to someone when you speak in someone else’s voice. I bring out the Bogart that’s served me so well in strange cities with strange women before. “But have we met someplace before? Some hotel somewhere in the late hours of the night when the scent of jasmine comes wafting in and—”

  “No,” she interrupts, holding up her hand. “We haven’t met before. But just because we’ve never met doesn’t mean we don’t know one another.” She smiles the most perfect and disarming smile I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

  “My name’s Kelly,” she says.

  Of course it is.

  “Of course it is,” I say. Then I bring the defense system online. “You know, that’s a nice set of pillars you’re standing on.”

  “Wow,” she says. “That’s your opener?”

  “You’d be surprised how often—”

  “Stop. Just stop.” She looks me in the eyes and there’s something in the softness of her eyes that threatens me with something wonderful if I’m willing to let down the defenses. But, dear God, how long has it been since that’s happened?

  “Just try introducing yourself and asking me out to dinner,” she says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We both know you want to,” she says.

  What the hell?

  “Hi,” I say, reluctant as frost on a spring morning. “My name’s ———. Do you want to get some dinner?”

  “Much better,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  She’s immediately interesting. And that’s never good. I’ve got to be careful with interesting women.

  * * *

  —

  So there we are, myself and this latest Kelly, sitting in a San Francisco restaurant. All the while I’m sitting there, all I can think about is her hair, her smile, her confidence, and the fact that I shouldn’t be here. I should be back at my hotel, and achieving the Kama Sutra’s most difficult maneuver with some woman I barely know and will never see again in this or any other lifetime. But, for better or worse, here I am.

  Just then, my phone rings. It’s Sharon, so, as rude as it is, I have to take the call. So I give a penitent nod and step away from the table.

  “Hello?” I answer.

  “This is a mistake,” Sharon says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “This platinum blonde woman with the smile and confidence.”

  “How do you know about her?”

  I look around, certain that I’m about to find Sharon sitting at a nearby table, watching. Sharon knows everything.

  “I know everything,” Sharon says. “And this woman is no good for you. You should be promoting Hell of a Book, not going out on dates. It’s one of your commandments.”

  “What about the other women I’ve met?”

  “Those weren’t dates. That was sex.” Sharon sighs. “Look, you’ve got a second book to be working on right now.”

  “But I’m still promoting the first book,” I say, feeling my stomach drop to the soles of my feet. I knew it was just a matter of time before she brought up the second book again. Hell of a Book was part of a two-book deal. Sharon said it showed “confidence and excitement” from the publisher. But what all that confidence and excitement really boiled down to was three months of me telling them what kind of book I wanted to write and three months of my editor telling me why the books I wanted to write were “not quite the type of book we publish.” Whenever I told them I thought the whole point of publishing was simply “to publish good books,” both Sharon and my editor laughed.

  The child had told a joke.

  “Even though you’re just two weeks into your tour, Hell of a Book has come and gone,” Sharon says. “That’s the nature of the business. Nobody cares about what you wrote last, only what you’re writing next. You’re only as good as your next project. That’s why publishers give out advances: to lock in that next project. And, speaking of which, you haven’t—”

  “No! I haven’t spent the advance money,” I shout.

  There’s a long pause. I think Sharon’s using her agent and publicist powers to peer into my soul. Finally, she speaks: “You have, haven’t you?”

  She knows. Dear God, she knows.

  “I haven’t spent the money,” I say. I speak the words slowly, brick by brick, trying to build a levee behind which I can hide. “Sharon, look, it’s all sitting in my account, untouched, just like you told me.”

  “First you’re on a date with this woman and now this,” Sharon says, her disappointment as thick as motor oil. “You’re digging a career grave. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Listen, I need to go. I’m in the middle of dinner.” My date with Kelly is my only way out. Better to admit to being on a date than to admit to having spent all of the advance money.

  Ask me what I spent the money on and I couldn’t say. All I know is that it was there one moment and gone the next. All of it. Tens of thousands of dollars. Nothing but a memory. I’m not even sure how I’m going to pay my rent once this tour is over. “I’m going to hang up now, Sharon. My dinner is getting cold.”

  “You haven’t even ordered yet,” she says.

  “Stop doing that!”

  “Fine,” she says. “But when this all comes crashing down around your ears, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Just before she hangs up, she says, “She likes your sport coat, by the way. I told you people like authors who wear sport coats.”

  “You did,” I say.

  “One last thing,” Sharon says. “I’m trying to set up a big interview for you in Denver. Papers, TV, libraries, sizzle reel, the whole deal.”

  “Denver? Why Denver? Why not New York or LA?”

  “Because I know where all the bodies are buried. That work for you?”

  “What does that even mean?” I say.

  “In means don’t ask questions, and trust in your agent like you trust in God.”

  “I’m an atheist.”

  “Only rich people are atheists. And who made you rich enough to be an atheist?” Sharon asks, reaching the big bang of one hell of a verbal artillery shelling.

  “You did,” I say.

  “Exactly,” she says. Then she’s gone.

  I make my way back to the table, a little confused, maybe even a little woozy. I’d love a drink. I’d love to get drunk. To slide away into that numb, familiar area where I’m not worried about Sharon, or Hell of a Book, or the next book that I haven’t even started writing, or what my publisher is going to do when I haven’t turned in a manuscript and don’t have their money. Or the fact that I think I just saw my dead mother sitting at the bar, looking at me as if there’s something I’m supposed to do for her. The Kid is here too, watching me the way he does. Waiting for me to do something or say something that he has yet to tell me. He reminds me of Poe’s Raven. Lingering at my imagination. Waiting to shout “Nevermore!” when I demand peace of mind and a glimpse of the way things used to be.

  “Nevermore,” The Kid whispers.

  “Fuck you, Kid,” I say.

  “What’s that?” Kelly asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “That really is a great sport coat,” Kelly says when I get back to the table.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Is everything okay? That call sounded pretty serious.”

  “Not at all, I say. Let’s just forget about it and focus on the two of us. I don’t usually do this sort of thing, you know.”

  “The hell you don’t,” she replies. “You’ve got ‘man-whore’ written all over you.”

  “Are you sure we haven’t met before?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” I say. �
�I suppose now you’ll want to talk about my book.”

  “Not really,” Kelly says just as the waiter comes walking up to our table. And, in spite of myself, I believe her. She doesn’t want to hear about my book.

  When you’re an author on tour, all anyone wants to talk about is your book. They want to hear the pitch. They want the plot points. They want to hear where you got the idea from so that they can go to wherever that place is and pick up one of their own. They want to hear what stores your book is in because that’s how most people judge the success of someone who says they’re an author. The more stores you’re in, the more likely they are to believe in you.

  Sometimes, you tell people you’re an author and they’ll pull out their phone and Google you, right there in front of your face. They’ll type in your name and, depending on the search results, decide for themselves whether or not you’re truly what you say you are. The modern author is only as important as their search results.

  And after they’ve found out that your book is actually in actual stores, they’ll want to know how you got your agent, how you got your editor, what software you use to write, how long it took you to write it, how much money you got paid, how many copies you sold, whether or not they’re going to make your book into a movie. “Hollywood always knows how to find the worthwhile books,” a reader once told me.

  There’s almost no end to the things people want to know when they meet an author, an actual author. But they rarely want to know anything about you. Your book becomes your identity, your identity becomes your book. Maybe Jack the Media Trainer was wrong when he said, “Every time someone asks you about your book, what they’re really asking is ‘Who are you?’”

  “Red wine, please,” Kelly says to the waiter.

  “Wait a second,” I say, blinking like a hazard light. “So you don’t want me to talk about my book?”

  “Nope.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Nope.”

  “But you know I’m an author, right?”

  “Yep. I was at the reading.”

  “Don’t you want to ask me how I got an agent? How I got published? All that?”

  “Not really,” she says. And, once again, I believe her, this latest and most perplexing Kelly.

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Just a date with a man I thought was attractive,” she says, and I can’t detect any irony or insincerity in her voice. “In fact, I haven’t even read your book. And I can’t honestly say that I will.”

  “But it’s a hell of a book. Of course you’ve read it. Everyone’s read it. It’s a bestseller!”

  “I actually didn’t know anything about it before tonight,” she replies. “Didn’t even know it existed. I just swung by the bookstore because there’s a very old and hard-to-find book I’ve been looking for and I thought I’d check. Then, when I got there, it turns out there was an author coming for an event. I’ve got the night off from work so I figured: Why not?”

  “Wine for you as well, sir?” It’s the waiter speaking. I’ve totally forgotten that he existed. Right now, there is only this anomaly of a woman. This Kelly. This first person in months who doesn’t want me to pitch my book, who doesn’t want to talk about sales or interviews, who isn’t going to ask me, “So what’s your next book about?” Right now, in this moment, I’m myself again. For the first time since I found my agent, I am not the thing that I do. I am not my book. I simply am.

  The waiter is patiently waiting for my order. The instinct is still to order wine. To get the alcohol into the veins and drift away. To give in to the fear. But then I might miss something. The lady, this latest Kelly, she’s interesting. And interesting things deserve our full attention in life.

  “Just water for me,” I say.

  “That’s good,” The Kid says. He knows that since he’s invisible, I can’t answer him back without looking like I belong on certain psychotropic medications. So I only smile at Kelly and pretend The Kid isn’t there. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll leave you alone for now. I just wanted to say that it’s good that you’re not drinking. You drink too much. I don’t think it’s good for you.”

  I want to tell The Kid to fuck off. I want to tell him that my coping mechanisms are my own and shan’t be interfered with. But when I turn, he’s already gone. Little bastard got the last word in. And when invisible kids want to get the last word in, they get it.

  Being The Unseen felt like the beginning of “I Got 5 On It.” Like the opening before the bass drops. Like the first thump of the bass. Like the first whisper of the first verse. Like the hook that bobs you up and down in your car. Like that.

  Like you got the glow. Like you’re Bruce Leroy, and Turbo, and Ozone all at the same time. Like you’re out there with that broom dancing back and forth while din-daa-daa echoes all around the world and that breathy sound that drives the rhythm is the sound of your own breath and you’re in control of it all. Like Freaknik back in ’96. Like you just woke up in a sea of blackness and there ain’t a white face in sight and you didn’t know that feeling existed until that very moment and it’s so foreign, and yet so beautiful, that you don’t know what to do with it and while a part of you loves it, another part of you wants to know where the White people at just in case these niggas get out of line because that’s what you’ve been taught that niggas do when left to their own devices.

  Like a cold winter’s morning and the only place you can find warmth is under your favorite blanket and you fall asleep there and wake up there all at the same time and it feels like your entire body and soul are caught up in the perfect warmth of that moment and all you know is that you don’t want to ever leave this place because it feels the way life is supposed to feel.

  But then the problem is that Soot began to understand just how much of a gift he had been given and he didn’t know what to do with it. He wanted his father to have the gift so that his father could feel the same way but his father was dead . . . wasn’t he?

  The idea of his father’s death flashed into Soot’s mind and he winced like he’d been hit, but no sooner did he feel the sting of pain than it receded, and he could believe it had never come at all. That his father was not at work, or elsewhere. What mattered still was here—his gift.

  It was too much of a dream, The Unseen. It was too smooth. Too perfect. Too Miles Davis. Too Prince. Too Soul Train. Too Martin. Too Def Comedy Jam. It was too much of a perfect and pristine thing to sit back and keep it to himself.

  The thing that he loved the most about being unseen was not seeing his own skin anymore. He had escaped his dark flesh. He had escaped Soot and, because of that, when he closed his eyes and thought about himself, he finally got a chance to see the boy who had been living behind his eyes for the very first time.

  The boy was small and vibrant-looking. He smiled. He laughed. He seemed happy with himself and the world. He was not a boy who was afraid. He was not a boy who got picked on while riding to school each morning. He was not a boy who watched the news with his father and heard reports of “Black-on-Black” crime and tried to understand what that meant, and tried to understand why there was no such thing as White-on-White crime, or tried to understand what it meant when his teachers told him that one in every three Black men would end up in prison.

  The boy, that Soot, was free of all of that. And he looked at Soot and smiled at him and didn’t pity him because the boy in The Unseen didn’t even know what pity was. He only knew what happiness was, and what compassion was, and what meaningfulness was, and what excitement was, and what swimming without being self-conscious was, and he knew that thump of the bass that came through and he knew that it meant that everything was going to be okay.

  But then he came out of it and his father was dead, killed right there on his front lawn under the light of the July moon, with his wife and son watching.

  Later that night, Kelly and I walk through
a small park somewhere in San Francisco. It’s picturesque in that way things only ever are in romantic comedies. You know the type:

  Boy meets girl.

  Boy loses girl.

  Boy gets girl back.

  Credits roll.

  On the drive home, you realize the girl was something, the boy was a chicken, and nothing was ever at risk for anyone.

  Chinese lanterns dangle from a small footbridge as we make our way through the park. The lanterns become small suns burning in the distance and I can believe, just for a moment, that all of us people are wandering the universe together as one. One of the truths we often overlook is that we are, all of us, always wandering the universe. We are perpetually hurtling on a rocky raft through the void, taking the tour of the cosmos at 67,000 miles per hour, every second of every day, and yet we still find time to stop and talk over bridges in the late hours of the night and maybe reach out and touch someone else’s hand.

  Renny has chosen this spot as the second part of our date. And as the two of us walk through the park together, Renny drives along nearby in the town car, watching like a concerned parent.

  “Never had a limo driver as a chaperone on a date before,” Kelly says.

  “Renny’s a good guy,” I reply. “Purely on the up-and-up.”

  “You’ve got an odd way about you. Why do you talk that way? Like you just stepped out of a mobster movie.”

  “I guess we’ve all got to be somebody in this life. So why not be somebody that does it differently? That’s my policy. And I get a feeling that you’re somebody that does it differently too, Dollface. Just look at that platinum hair of yours. That’s not exactly out of the Martha Stewart playbook.”

  “I guess,” she says, and she pulls a hair away from her face and I want to be the hand that touches that hair that touches that face. “But don’t ever call me Dollface again.”

  “Okay.” I can’t help but smile and I don’t know why.