by H. M. Mann
I am a virile, employed, heterosexual, educated, well-read, not terrible looking, clean, somewhat spiritual, and easygoing 30-year-old man. I have my own place, my own car, and am debt-free. My problem? I’m not enough for the modern woman to notice. The modern woman seems to want buff, tough, filthy rich, brilliant, metro-sexual, trendy, and fashionable alpha males with beard stubble on their faces and a trust fund in their pockets. I could never be all those things. What can I do to find true love? Signed, Average Man in America
The response: “Get counseling, you freak!”
This was Johnny’s first critical review. He had saved it, of course, because even a negative review from a national source was a positive in his mind. He had even posted it on the wall above his writing space to motivate him.
“Get counseling, you freak!” became his mantra.
Luckily, only the mice heard him mumbling it long into the night.
As a result, Johnny evolved naturally into a writer of military spy thrillers, since most of these writers seemed to need counseling, too. Johnny had seen all the Jason Bourne and James Bond movies. He had read John LeCarre and Ian Fleming, even if Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang threw him for a loop. He had played Call of Duty and Splinter Cell Double Agent demos at Best Buy. All he had to do was spend half the book describing the high-tech weaponry and the other half of the book blowing up stuff while jumping all over the globe from “flashpoint to flashpoint.” It would be easy for his hero, Denzel “The Rock” Connery (codename: “Columbia”), to save the world, and because readers expected a little romance, he knew just how he would begin In His Commander-in-Chief’s Clandestine Stealthy Super Sneaky Service:
They had killed dear Emily, the dearest love of his life, and they would pay dearly.
“I will bury them,” he said, pounding his fist on his kitchen table, which also doubled as a Patriot missile array if the kitchen got too hot.
He had no idea who “they” were, but he didn’t care. He looked at his store of weapons in a secret compartment in his basement that no one knew about, not even the man who installed the secret compartment to house them …
Sixty pages of exhaustive descriptions of secret, cutting-edge weaponry later, Johnny typed: “He was ready. He was armed. He was dangerous. He was—”
Tired.
Johnny was tired. He had researched weaponry for days at Janes.com and spewed it all into his laptop. With all these technical specifications getting in the way of a good story, how could he keep his thriller “taut,” a word he had seen often on the back cover of military spy thrillers? How could he keep his female readers interested unless he broke up a firefight, shootout, or some daring hand-to-hand combat for a flashback to Denzel getting romantic with dear Emily? How could he suspend readers’ disbelief that, in the middle of battle, Denzel would flash on some of dearest Emily’s innocent flesh?
“Write what you know!” the how-to books screamed at him from their covers on his bookshelf, but how could Johnny write about what he had never experienced? How could anyone? Sure, he and Marla had gotten romantic, but that was back when Johnny was firmly in the middle of the weight charts at the doctor’s office and had several somewhat defined abs. Now he was a fringe dweller on the far right in the red section with a single, lonely ab. He could have blamed the cheese at Señor Pizza, or the sweet iced tea he drank for every meal, or the combination of the two that provided him with hours of pleasure in the bathtub every few months when he was working out a kidney stone.
But he didn’t.
It’s the life, he realized. I can’t very well write about it if I’m out living it, right? I have to keep my literary distance to write about the unknown effectively.
He put the spy thriller in the “Garbage” folder on his laptop and tried writing a “Contemporary Issue” novel but could only think of ranting about the life of the average “pizza guy”:
Through fog, rain, sleet, wind, hail, traffic, and blistering sun, I bring you your dinner so you don’t have to cook. I should be your hero, but I’m not.
How do you treat me? You don’t shovel your walks or porches when it snows, not even sprinkling a little salt I can track around later. You leave no lights on, don’t have house or apartment numbers, and give the worst directions imaginable. You tell me to “turn left at the old Sears,” a building that now houses a police precinct. You tell me to “drive till you get to the fire hydrant,” and I end up wasting twenty minutes looking for a dog with its leg up in the air. “You can’t miss it cuz my truck’s parked in the yard,” you tell me, and on some streets, every yard contains at least one truck.
Oh, sure. You have a nice house. I’ll bet it has a bazillion bricks in it. You want me to come inside and put the pizzas on your kitchen table. So you can show off, right?
This kitchen is as big as my entire apartment, and I’ll bet the house was built around this mammoth mahogany table. You could literally go bowling on all the granite counters.
Yes, I need the coupon, and no, I don’t have change for a hundred.
No one I know has change for a hundred.
I know a lot of people.
We don’t know the same people, I assure you.
No, we don’t take credit cards yet.
Yes, our competitors are far more modern than we are.
No, I couldn’t take your credit card number “just this once.”
Yes, we should run screaming into the twenty-first century and take credit cards, but what do you expect me to do about it this second?
Sure, I’ll wait here in your kitchen cavern while you “scrounge up” some change. Take your time. I only have twenty other customers waiting to get their soggy boxes.
Gosh, thanks for leaving your creepy kid here to pick his nose and show his boogers to me before smearing them onto the box. I would tell you about the extra topping he’s also adding to your pizza, but I won’t. It blends in so nicely with the green olives and banana peppers.
I’ll bet you’re going to give me exact change.
You’re kidding.
A pickle jar full of pennies? Now I’ve seen everything.
“No problem,” I say, but watching you count out thirteen hundred pennies while your son digs for more gold right under your nose is not my idea of a good time.
Yes, do put it in something for my long journey home …
“My name’s Bobby. What’s your name?”
I’m the Booger Man, kid, and I’ll come get you tonight while you sleep.
Oh my gosh! A sock? All the possibilities, and you brought me a linty tube sock for these pennies.
I don’t give a hoot if it’s clean or if the dryer ate the other one.
Oh, yes. I can see you think this is a hoot. You’ve solved a problem, haven’t you? You and your hundred-dollar bill knowing we only carry twenty-five, you and your pickle jar full of pennies, you and this child who is obviously hungry since he’s now eating his crusty snot.
Yes, I need the coupon.
I am required to bring back the coupon.
You don’t know my boss.
You can’t possibly know my boss.
You’re not from Guatemala.
No, you haven’t kept the coupon before, and yes, I was the driver that “other” time.
I am the only driver, ma’am.
I don’t know why I’m the only driver, ma’am. It must be fate, but I doubt you want to have a philosophical argument with a frustrated pizza guy tonight.
“Just this once” won’t cut it.
“Pretty please” and “Give me a break” do not move me.
You live in a freaking mansion, and I live in an efficiency apartment, so you give me a break.
I’m holding a sock full of pickled pennies that my boss will make me count out and roll later, you’re not tipping me, your son is pasting his chunky boogers to your pizza, and—
Then don’t call us again, I want to say.
I hope your kid has the rotavirus …
Because J
ohnny felt he couldn’t sustain his rant for three hundred pages, he turned, naturally, to writing a self-help book, which usually ranted for around one hundred pages and contained copious amounts of nifty how-to pictures, an index, and a glossary. How to be the Best Pizza Delivery Driver You Can Be chronicled the steps the average person would use to secure a glamorous, lucrative pizza joint position making anywhere from “$10 to $15 an hour!!!”
Johnny even reduced it to ten simple steps since most readers of self-help books couldn’t count to eleven:
1) Show up in your car, truck, or van (duh) for the interview at a pizza joint (duh). Do not show up on a motorcycle (duh) or on a bicycle (duh) or on foot (are you crazy?). Make sure the pizza joint delivers because some don’t.
2) Ask for an interview, and lie if you have to. They actually expect you to lie about your work record, so put on a good show. Having a valid driver’s license and a clean driving record is a plus, but it’s usually not required. Make sure you stay conscious during the interview. They like that in a driver.
3) Once you get the job, usually on the spot, dress appropriately in a ridiculous, hideous uniform no one on planet earth would ever wear even to a costume party. The uniform, the hat, and the lighted sign they require you to put on your vehicle make you a target for the pettiest of thieves, so wear a big coat over your uniform, remove the lighted sign before every run, and change hats whenever you get into your vehicle.
4) Bag the entire order at the pizza joint. Customers get severely angry if you forget their freaking breadsticks and the day-old hot wings, and you don’t want to revisit customers who are severely angry about food liberally laced with e coli.
5) Locate the customer’s house or apartment on a map made during the Kennedy administration before most neighborhoods were even born. You may or may not locate the address. Have some quarters handy to use in payphones to get directions or carry a cell phone. You will never be able to afford GPS, so don’t even dream about it.
6) Drive to the address following most traffic laws in a generally direct route. Try not to run over dogs, cats, pedestrians, skunks, groundhogs, or potholes.
7) At the door, announce the price, get the money, hand the pizza(s) to the customer, and make change (if necessary). Avoid small talk, especially with snot-nosed little brats named Bobby. If a customer asks you to bring the pizza(s) inside, and the customer looks harmless, go on in. If the customer gives you the creeps (and most do), say, “Store policy forbids us to enter any homes.”
8) Don’t even bother to kiss butt to get a bigger tip. Either customers will tip you or they won’t. Mentally memorize the address of non-tippers and put their orders last on any future runs. Make sure you hit as many curbs as possible on your way to these cheapskates. You want them to enjoy peeling the cheese off the cardboard box.
9) Always mumble “Thank you.” You won’t want to, but what else can you do?
10) Return to the pizza joint and follow steps 4-9 again … and again … until closing time when you may have to count out and roll thirteen hundred pennies and sweep and mop before you go home.
Once again, Johnny didn’t have enough information to fill a book, so he set out to write the next best thing—a diet book called The Pizza Diet. Unfortunately, he could only come up with one recipe that made any sense to him. It contained all the food groups, was easy to prepare, and was more cost-effective than any other diet plan:
THE RECIPE: Thin crust, light sauce, low fat mozzarella, pineapple, lean hamburger, green peppers, onions, banana peppers, mushroom, olives—whatever floats your boat—as long as you don’t use anchovies because anchovies are nasty and will give you cancer from the toxins that flow daily into our lakes, rivers, bays, and oceans.
DAILY ROUTINE: Make pizza in the morning. Cook until the cheese melts and the meats look less alive. Cut into twelve slices. Eat four slices for each meal, which is about eight ounces of food. Exercise if you want to—or don’t. Don’t eat anything else but this pizza. Drink a lot of water. You should lose weight, but if you don’t, you’re cheating or have a gland problem. As with any diet, see your doctor before beginning one. It’s his or her way to make a buck off you trying to get healthier without his or her ridiculously expensive help.
Since his diet book only filled a page and had no television show tie-in, Johnny then attempted to write a “Family Saga” only to realize he knew nothing about genealogy, geography, or technology. He also got tired of writing the same thing again and again …
The Pilgrims came to town …
The Iroquois came to town …
The British came to town …
George Washington came to town …
George Washington’s mistress, Sally Hemings, came to town …
The gypsies came to town …
The dad-blasted Yankees came to town …
Abraham Lincoln came to town …
The Pony Express came to town …
The Iron Horse came to town …
The horseless carriage came to town …
Murderous thieving scum came to town …
The dad-blasted Yankees returned to town …
The cholera came to town …
The Diphtheria came to town …
The influenza came to town …
The interstate highway didn’t come to town …
Hicksville, Virginia, Johnny’s town, never thrived or even grew, but folks and their transportation devices still streamed in anyway. After fifty pages, he couldn’t remember the name of the original patriarch, who came over from Scotland in 1770 just in time to earn some buckshot during the Boston Massacre, participate in the Boston Tea Party, and manually cure Paul Revere’s constipated horse before Revere’s midnight ride.
Johnny’s disgust at such a thought, naturally, caused him to void the family saga and write a fantasy, his cast of misfits sounding like Smurfs on steroids:
Flutterby was a tree-hugging wood nymph with magical powers. Though she was only eleven inches tall, she could transform into a blue whale whenever she wanted to, as long as there was plenty of water around for her massive body.
Flutterby enjoyed casting spells on the other wood nymphs. It was her thing. It empowered her. It made her feel taller. It made her forget she smelled like a blue whale. Her favorite spell caused all the other wood nymphs to have really bad eczema, and since Flutterby also made anti-itch potion out of the magic plant gronwynwyn, she was very rich.
One day, Flutterby got some bad news. The really bad, uptight Tree People of Salem Wood were on the march to destroy her gronwynwyn fields because they believed gronwynwyn was habit-forming, led to harder drugs like aspirin, and smelled faintly like blue whale. She had to get some muscle, so she summoned Pew the Pepe, Fog Leg Horn, and Martian the Marvin …
Johnny gave up on this story soon after. He hated writing about two-dimensional, cartoon-ish characters, and he was not about to start. Leave that kind of writing to prime-time television, he had thought.
He was too afraid to finish the first sentence of his horror novel: “He ran through the door and saw …”
And he got no further than one sentence in his attempt at a murder mystery: “Stephen Butler did it.”
After several months, Johnny had several hundred novel starts and no finishes when he decided to write a modern memoir, not knowing, or evidently caring, that thirty-year-old, unpublished pizza delivery drivers didn’t write memoirs anyone would ever read. He had tried a literary approach first:
He was born.
He knew that.
He knew he had been born.
This was vital knowledge.
It was a fact of life, this birth, he thought. One had to be born, eh? Good old birth. My reason for being here.
He didn’t know where he was born or to whom, however, and that made him angry.
The phrase “made him angry” changed to “pained him to no end” and then to “reminded him how insignificant he was when compared to the whole freaking universe, whi
ch was freaking huge and went in all directions” before finalizing into “made him really angry.”
His life sucked so bad that his tongue lodged in his esophagus, flies flocked to him in droves, and his toilets, sinks, and tub never became clogged because the entire world sucked all around him.
He knew he had been born in America, and that was enough.
He was an American.
That, too, was enough.
He had been adopted by a well-meaning Virginia couple on a well-meaning farm in a time without meaning …
Before Johnny was adopted, he wished he had rich parents who were traveling the globe until he turned eighteen, and they would return with great pomp and circumstance to give him a multimillion-dollar trust fund, a Ferrari, a summer home in the Rockies, and a lifetime supply of Captain Crunch.
That hadn’t happened.
At eighteen, Johnny’s only excitement was registering for the draft and going to Virginia Tech to study engineering.
Before he was adopted, whenever a classmate had asked “Where’s your daddy?” or “Where’s your mama?” Johnny usually lied. Depending on his audience, he said his parents had “died in the war” or were currently “astronauts on a space station.” In first grade, he told anyone who would listen that he was really a test-tube baby.
No one, of course, had believed him, and when the Holidays adopted him when he was six, Johnny changed overnight from Jonathan Rutherford Orr to Johnny “No Middle Name” Holiday.
And none of this made good “literary nonfiction,” as some referred to memoirs, so he changed his memoir to first person:
I was born.
I know that.
I know I have been born.
Who doesn’t know that?
I mean, I wasn’t born yesterday, right?
It is a fact of life, birth. One has to be born, eh? Good old birth. My reason for being here.
I don’t know where I was born or to whom, however, and that sucks big rocks, little rocks, and every rock in between, even the tiny little rocks that masquerade as sand.
Though he thought this new version was much more powerful and direct in the present tense, and though it had an in-your-face Hemingway-as-sloppy-drunk feel to it, he decided that this, too, was garbage, and by extension, that his life was garbage.