The Book of Joe (12 page)

Band-Aids are best applied by somebody else. There's something about pulling off those white plastic tabs by myself that always feels pathetic, seems to emphasize the fact that there's no one in the world to do it for me. With a sigh, I lean into the mirror to plant the adhesive strip on my skull, and something reflecting behind me catches my eye. In the corner of the mirror, I can see the door to my father's bedroom, half closed, and on the back of it hangs a framed poster. I turn around and confirm, to my great surprise, that it's the poster from last year's theatrical release of
Bush Falls.
The artwork depicts a somewhat distant swimming pool framed in the bare spread legs and bikini-clad bottom of a woman standing with her back to the camera. Standing waist-deep in the water between those legs is Leonardo DiCaprio, who stares up at the unseen top half of the woman in goofy, exaggerated wonder. Beneath the photo, in a grand white script, are the words B
USH
F
ALLS
followed by the ridiculous tag line T
HE
S
UMMER
J
UST
G
OT A
L
ITTLE
B
IT
H
OTTER.
Owen laughed uncontrollably for a good ten minutes when he first saw the poster. “Oh, my Lord!” he exclaimed dramatically in the fake Southern accent he always trots out for just this sort of occasion. “That is just too precious!”

“It's cheesy,” I complained, irked by his condescension.

“Deliciously cheesy,” he corrected me, and then collapsed into another paroxysm of full-bellied laughter. I was less than amused, wondering what Lucy Haber would think when she saw that poster.

And now here it is, hanging inexplicably in my father's bedroom. I stare at it intently, as if I might somehow discern the meaning of its presence by forensic analysis. Why does a father hang up the poster of a movie based on his son's novel? The only answer that I can come up with, dumbfounding as it is, is pride. My father was proud of me. The town was in an uproar about the book when it first came out, the local papers filled with furious editorials and defensive denials from all involved in the events described. When the movie came out two years later, dozens of newsmagazines and entertainment tabloids reignited the hullabaloo as they came in droves to do stories on the town and track down the people behind the movie's twisted characters. I was viciously derided by every person who managed to speak to a reporter. Sheriff Muser even tried to organize a class action lawsuit against me. And in the midst of all that furor, my father, with whom I'd barely spoken in ten years, framed and hung the movie poster in his bedroom, where he could see it every night as he climbed into bed.

With mounting apprehension, I run downstairs and into my father's den. There, beside the trophy case and framed basketball awards, both his and Brad's, stands an Ikea bookcase with glass doors, in which I discover fifteen hardcover versions of
Bush Falls
and another twenty or so paperbacks with the movie poster pictured on the cover. Lying on top of the bookcase is a wide, flat book, which turns out to be a scrapbook, the kind they sell in stationery stores. The binding cracks loudly as I open it with shaking hands. On each page, carefully centered and glued under the protective plastic sheets, are a wide assortment of reviews of
Bush Falls,
everything from the
New York Times
to
Entertainment Weekly
as well as
The Minuteman
and some other regional papers. On the top left corner of one of the reviews, I notice a small imprint that reads “VMT Media Services.” He actually hired a clipping service to track my press. My legs become rubber, and I sit down hard on the small couch against the wall, still clutching the scrapbook in my hands. The couch smells of my father's aftershave and pipe tobacco. “What the hell?” I say out loud as a tear runs down my cheek and lands on the brown faux leather of the scrapbook. A second tear soon follows, and then a third. I stare at those three wet spots on the cover, wondering what the hell they mean. Before I've come up with anything, though, sleep is on me like shrink-wrap, and the last thing I hear is the sound of the scrapbook slipping out of my fingers and landing with a gentle thud on the carpeted floor.

fifteen

I get my first flying book at around eight the next morning. One doesn't instantly identify the sound of a flying book. The light, fluttering sound of airborne pages is followed by a jarring thud as the book caroms off the living room picture window and lands in the front yard. I roll off the couch in my father's den, nauseous and without any discernible center of gravity, and peer groggily out the living room window, expecting to see another dazed or broken bird lying bewildered on the lawn. Instead, I am greeted by my own face smiling pretentiously up at me from the dust jacket of a hardcover copy of
Bush Falls,
which lies facedown and spread open, the upper portion of the book's spine indented from its collision with the window. The street in front of the house is completely deserted.

There is the sound of soft breathing behind me, and I turn around to find Jared sleeping on the living room couch in jeans and a black T-shirt that says “Bowling for Soup.” I don't remember seeing him there when I came in last night, although that can hardly be considered conclusive. “Hey, Jared,” I mumble. Four beds upstairs, and we both slept on couches.

“Hey,” he grunts back, not opening his eyes.

“You'll be late for school.”

He opens one eye. “Doesn't really pay to go, then, does it?” The eye closes.

He'll get no argument from me. I head upstairs for a shower, pausing only long enough to doff my shorts and perform some spastic dry heaves over the toilet. The light hits my eyes like needles, so I shower in the dark, leaning against the cold tiles in an effort to wake myself up. The hot water pummels my scalp soothingly, cascading in torrents down my face and shoulders, and my mind wanders. I think about Wayne and then my father and the scrapbook I found last night. It's unbelievable to me that before yesterday they and the Falls were such a remote part of my life, distant memories more than anything else. Now they threaten to consume me, the protective barrier of the last seventeen years dissipating like a mirage.

I step dripping into my bedroom, feeling hungover and old, to find Jared clipping his toenails on my bed. “Look at you,” he says with an inquisitive smirk, taking in my battered face and bruised ribs.

“You look. I'm too tired.”

“You know,” he continues disinterestedly. “Statistically speaking, blocking at least some punches in a fight will usually lead to a more favorable outcome.”

“I'll take that under advisement.”

There's another bang from downstairs, and we both look out the window to see a green station wagon disappearing around the corner. On the lawn there is now a second copy of
Bush Falls
splayed out fairly close to the first one. “What's up with that?” Jared asks, not concerned, just mildly curious, and then leans back to resume clipping his toenails.

My cell phone rings, and Jared picks it up off the night table and tosses it to me. It's Owen, calling to see how things are going. I update him on my father's condition, and he clucks and murmurs in all the right places. “And how has it been otherwise?” he asks pointedly. “You know, your return to the Falls?”

“Pretty crazy.”

“I knew it!” he exclaims gleefully. “Do tell, do tell.”

I quickly relate all of the events of the past day, listening to Owen's delighted gasps while Jared watches me, listening raptly, smirking when I include the incident of his coitus interruptus. “So let's review,” Owen says when I'm done, not even trying to conceal his merriment. “In the last twenty-four hours, you've returned to your hometown, where essentially everybody hates you, you've been reunited, however awkwardly, with your estranged family, you've walked in on a sexual liaison, gotten in trouble with the law, been assaulted on two separate occasions, and met up with an ailing friend and gotten drunk with him. Am I leaving anything out?”

I consider telling him about the flying books, but I haven't gotten my mind wrapped around that one yet, so I leave it out. “That's pretty much it,” I say.

Owen whistles softly. “I wonder what you're going to do today.”

“You make it sound like I planned all of this.”

“
Au contraire, mon frère.
For the first time in god knows how long, it's spinning wonderfully out of your control.”

“And what the hell does that mean?”

But Owen has to go. “Listen, I'm late for something. We'll talk later.”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“Did you finish the manuscript?” I ask hesitantly.

“It's interesting that you refer to it as ‘the' manuscript,” Owen says. “Most writers, passionate about their work, will always refer to it in the possessive, as in ‘my' manuscript.”

“What's your point?”

“It seems you're already distancing yourself from your work.”

“Oh, fuck off,” I say. “Did you read it or not?”

“I did.”

“And?”

“I have,” he says, inhaling as he searches for the right word, “issues.”

“So I gathered,” I say dejectedly. “What do we do now?”

Owen sighs. “Well, we could make some changes and I'm sure I could still sell it, but I'm not convinced your interests are best served that way.”

I allow the implications of that to sink in for a moment. “It's really bad, isn't it?”

“You're a good writer, Joe.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake. Just say it sucked.”

“If I thought it sucked, I would tell you it sucked.” Owen takes another deep breath. “Listen, we've discussed this. You know the second one's always a bitch. There's too much riding on it. It's almost worth writing just to get it the fuck out of the way.”

“So we just forget about it and move on to book number three?”

“That idea is not without merit.”

“And why won't book three be just as bad? I can't even figure out where this one went wrong.”

“Ah, but I already have,” Owen says grandly. “That's why you pay me the big bucks.”

“Would you care to enlighten me?”

“I could, but muddling through on your own is a critical journey for you as a writer.”

“You are so full of shit,” I say, annoyed.

“It's true, it's true,” he admits.

“Then what good are you?”

“That, my friend, is a whole other conversation,” he says with a chuckle. “I'll call you back.”

I snap the phone shut and toss it onto the bed in disgust. “Problems?” Jared says.

“Just the usual.” I notice his T-shirt again. I know I'll regret it, but I ask anyway. “What's ‘Bowling for Soup'?”

“A band.”

“Never heard of them,” I say. This doesn't appear to shock my nephew in the least. And there it is, out in the open for all to see. I am officially an old fart. “What kind of band are they?” I ask, determined to prove that I'm at least generally up to speed.

“Kind of a mixture of pop and SoCal punk.”

“SoCal?”

“Southern California,” he explains. “Take the punk rock from your generation, like the Ramones or the Sex Pistols—”

“They were before my time,” I point out weakly.

“Whatever,” he says. “Anyway, take that stuff, add better musicians and production values and better songwriting, and that's basically SoCal punk.”

“Like Blink 182,” I say.

“Like Blink before they sold out,” Jared says, wrapping up his toenail clippings in a tissue and tossing it into the wastebasket behind me, and for a brief instant I hate him.

“Fenix TX?” I try.

Jared looks up at me, surprised, and I feel a little better. “You listen to Fenix?”

“Doesn't everybody?”

My cell phone rings again while I'm tying my shoes. “Could you get that?” I say.

Jared flips open the phone, and even from where I'm crouched across the room, I can hear Nat's voice shouting through the plastic. “Oops,” he says with a grin, leaning forward to hand me the phone. I listen for a few more seconds, and then she hangs up. “Man,” Jared says. “Does anybody like you?”

“You like me, don't you?”

He grins sadly at me and says, “I don't count, man.”

         

My arrival makes the front page of
The Minuteman,
above the fold, no less. Jared has retrieved the paper from its plastic blue mailbox at the edge of the driveway and now tosses it onto the counter in the kitchen while I'm mixing some Folgers into a mug. “You're famous again,” he says with his trademark grin. “Controversial Author Returns” is the headline in the top left corner. Below it is a grainy reproduction of my book jacket author photo. With mounting unease, I sit down and read the article.

After a 17-year absence, author Joseph Goffman returned to Bush Falls yesterday. Goffman's best-selling novel,
Bush Falls,
angered many residents here when it was released in 1999. The book was loosely based on a number of incidents alleged to have taken place in Goffman's senior year at Bush Falls High. Although the book is classified as fiction, the author's use of these incidents, as well as characters clearly based on well-known residents of the Falls, caused a great deal of controversy when the novel was first published. Many locals viewed the book as nothing short of libel, written with deliberate malice and the intent to damage reputations. The novel and its author were widely condemned in raging editorials in this newspaper and on local radio and television stations as well. The recent film version, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kirsten Dunst, has done nothing to assuage the collective anger felt toward Mr. Goffman.

Coach Thomas Dugan was one of those singled out for a negative portrayal in the novel. “I don't care about what he wrote about me,” commented Dugan at the time. “But the condescending, offensive way in which he wrote about our beloved team and its history, which has meant so much to so many of the good people of this town throughout the years, is unforgivable. He's insulted every boy who ever played for the Cougars, and all of the good people who support them.”

“This is a guy who's gotten rich by lying about the people in this town,” said Deputy Sheriff Dave Muser, a former classmate of Goffman's who feels he personally suffered from a negative portrayal in the novel. “It's a slap in all of our faces that he thinks he can just walk back into the Falls. He should know he's no longer welcome here.”

Alice Lippman, whose women's book club meets monthly at Paperbacks Plus, was similarly outraged. “We selected
Bush Falls
when it first came out, and I don't think there was a single member of the book club who wasn't morally outraged by it. I hope I run into Mr. Goffman, so that I can tell him in person what an awful, destructive man he is.”

Goffman's father, local businessman Arthur Goffman, suffered a stroke this past Monday while playing basketball in the Cougars alumni league. Although father and son are reportedly estranged, it is his father's condition that is presumably the reason for Goffman's return to the Falls.

There is no byline, and I wonder if Carly wrote the article. If not, as editor in chief she'd at least have reviewed it before it went to press. I scan the article carefully, searching for any slant, any choice of words that might render some clue as to what her attitude toward me might be, but I come up empty. I discard the paper and, for the first time since my return, really allow myself to think about Carly, something I've been deliberately avoiding up until now. I would be hard-pressed to conjure up the images of women I dated a few weeks ago, but reconstructing Carly's face on the canvas of my mind takes absolutely no effort.

And now, sitting in my father's kitchen, I recall easily the taste of her kisses, the expression on her face as I clumsily worked to undo the buttons of her blouse that first time, a delightful combination of naked desire and affectionate humor. I told her I loved her, my chest quivering from the absolute truth of it all, and she kissed me deeply and said it right back. We lasted eight months, barely a pinprick on the overall time line, but when you're eighteen, time isn't nearly as crotchety and relentless as it becomes soon thereafter, and eight months is nothing less than a lifetime.

I push myself away from the table and head outside, stepping over the battered copy of
Bush Falls
lying faceup on the front walk, resolved to leave the books where they've landed. I'm opening the car door when I see that sometime during the night someone keyed my Mercedes, a handful of nasty, jagged streaks that traverse the car door in a clumsy, serpentine path, decimating the paint job. I study the scarred metal for a moment, the indecipherable hieroglyphics of vandalism, then climb into the car, taking pains not to disturb my bruised rib cage any more than is absolutely necessary. I drive off, still thinking about how far I've unwittingly drifted from the boy I used to be and wondering at how little I have to show for it.