The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written

THE WORST ROMANCE

NOVEL EVER WRITTEN

A multicultural romance

by

H. M. Mann

Kinfolk Books

Roanoke, VA

Copyright © 2011 by H. M. Mann

Cover picture courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s warped imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental … and unfortunate.

“
No One Said” by Thomas A. Page © 2004. Used by permission.

Also available from Kinfolk Books and H. M. Mann:

PAINT

JADE ED.

EVERY DOG

THE WAKING

MRS. MAYOR

REDEMPTION

NEEDY GREEDY LOVE

MISTAKEN IDENTITIES

WAN YU AND TONYA SAVE THE WORLD … TWICE!

1

Johnny Holiday wrote horrifically bad novels on his laptop while delivering pizzas in a lime green ‘74 Vega.

And he was horrifically good at it.

As far as he knew, he was the only pizza driver on earth (or at least in Roanoke, Virginia) who typed more than customers tipped him as he made his nightly rounds earning lousy tips and lousier complaints.

At least he hadn’t resorted to a life of crime.

The novels he wrote were crimes enough.

In some literary circles, critics could consider his novels felonious assaults on the mind.

With a great deal of malice aforethought.

While the Vega coughed blue smoke and generally tried valiantly not to stall out at a stoplight, Johnny tapped out “Have any trouble finding us?” on his laptop, expertly propped up and secured with duct tape on three Roanoke phonebooks lashed to the passenger seat, a stack of empty pizza warming bags strewn around the back seat.

The traffic light turned green. He typed “I didn’t really have a coupon, you know? Trying to save my pennies, you know? It’s this economy, you know? Stupid people in Washington and on Wall Street, you know? Sorry I don’t have a tip for you, you know?” with his free hand, the jerk behind him in a Suburban the size of Greenland honking his horn and ruining Johnny’s inspiration. To punish the suburbanite behind him, Johnny threw the gearshift into neutral and revved the Vega’s engine until the traffic light again turned a rosy red amid all the blue smoke, the air almost purple.

A tap at his window later, Johnny looked up at the hips of a blue-jeaned man who could have been a pirate captain in another life, only the parrot missing from his shoulder. Johnny wished the man had patches on both of his squinting, evil eyes.

Swarthy,
Johnny thought.
This is a swarthy man. Would it be bad manners to ask a swarthy man how he got those scars on his cheeks? Probably.

Johnny rolled down his window, doing his best to look clueless and flustered. He respected the swarthy and the scarred, and he was generally adept at looking clueless and flustered. It was part of his job description.

“
What is your function, fool?” the modern pirate growled.

Johnny typed “What is your function, fool?” then shut his laptop. “Must have stalled. Sorry.”

“
The engine’s still running, ya dork!”

Johnny blinked. “Maybe I just need oil. This car burns a lot of oil, you know.”

“
Move it or lose it!”

“
Moving …”

A writer by calling and a pizza delivery driver by necessity, Johnny turned into the crowded lot of Quick-E Mart and eased beside the only free gas pump. After the Vega coughed twice and clanked off, he got out and held up five fingers to Gloria Minnick, the cashier behind the Virginia Lottery sign, and she turned on the pump so Johnny could unleash exactly five dollars of unleaded into the Vega.

The entire ordeal took twenty-seven seconds.

Johnny liked Gloria, mainly because she trusted him to come inside with five dollars while lesser men might have driven away, and partially because she was one of the few people on earth who actually spoke to him regularly.

She was, he also thought late at night at his efficiency apartment, imminently cute. Since he wrote at night and had never been one to think too much, Johnny rarely had these coherent thoughts. Just now as he replaced the gas cap, though, he realized that Gloria was more beautiful than cute. He was sure she was more than a smiling face in the night.

He reached through the passenger window, opened the laptop, waited for the cursor, and typed “She was more than a smiling face in the night.”

He closed the laptop and entered Quick-E Mart, a tinny bell ringing behind him. He waited patiently in line behind a dozen or so people frantically trying to play the lottery before the live drawing at eleven, Gloria zipping their cards into the reader and ringing them up flawlessly.

We’re all just a bunch of foolish dreamers in this life,
Johnny thought as he waited in line.
We’re all just people using stubby, dull pencils without erasers to cash in on the American Dream. Golfers use the same pencils. I guess we’re all just shooting for that elusive hole-in-one.

When it was his turn, he smoothed out five crumpled ones and placed them in Gloria’s hand.

“
You could have just laid them on the counter and left, Johnny,” Gloria said.

Johnny shrugged. “It’s okay.”

“
Good night?” she asked.

“
So-so,” he said.

Gloria had nice hands, delicate hands, hands that shouldn’t have been taking debit cards, change, and cash at a Quick-E Mart. She had educated hands, interested dark brown eyes, and smooth brown skin. The blue Quick-E Mart uniform did little to hide her curves and cushions, her nametag riding proudly on top of two appetizing, delectable—

“
Doing any writing?” she asked.

“
Some.”

He had once had trouble at the pump—he had forgotten to push up the metal thingy-dingy that probably has a scientific-sounding name—and she had questioned him about his “vehicular office,” as he called it.

Tonight, Johnny smiled at the orange counter. He and the orange counter were old friends, though the counter rarely smiled back. “Slow night.”

“
Yeah,” she said. “Wish I could say the same.”

Johnny felt the full weight of the herd stamping its hooves beside and behind him, waiting to lose their money to Virginia’s education fund while folks from out of state and even out of the country collected the big lottery prizes. “Move it or lose it!” their hooves seemed to say. “Have a good one,” he said to the jar asking for donations to the Timmy Johnson ATV Accident Fund.

“
You, too,” Gloria said, sliding Johnny a cherry red Dum-Dum sucker.

Johnny dug into his pocket for a quarter, but Gloria waved her educated hand, the international sign of “It’s on me.”

It had only taken Johnny six visits to figure this out, but he was always forgetting.

He looked up briefly at Gloria’s interested brown eyes. “Thanks.” He took the sucker. “Take care.”

“
You, too.”

He rapped the counter with his knuckles. “Bye.”

“
Bye.”

On his way to Señor Pizza, he tapped their conversation into his laptop. Their “nocturnal liaisons,” as he called them, rarely deviated from one night to the next. Sometimes Gloria first asked, “Have you done any writing?” One time she asked, “How’s life?” Johnny didn’t have a response for that question. He couldn’t answer “yes” or “no” to that one, though “so-so” might have sufficed. Other times Gloria slid a lime green sucker across the counter. He always rapped his knuckles, as if this were the proper way to end conversations with cute cashiers at Quick-E Marts in Roanoke, Virginia, Star City of the South.

He putted back to Señor Pizza, where Hector, the owner and sole cook, waited. Hector was a short, intense, Guatemalan man who smelled like yeast, pepperoni, and Old Spice. Hector’s thick black mustache bounced up and down while he talked, his wooly worm eyebrows moving in opposite directions. It was as if his face was a trampoline, and seriously skinny and hairy children were jumping up and down upon it.

“
Where have you been?” Hector asked. “I nearly call the police.”

Johnny handed Hector some money, a few checks, and the receipts. “Made a wrong turn.”

Hector shook his head. “Make right turns and you will make more money.” He handed back several crumpled ones. “Very slow tonight. No more deliveries. You go home.”

Johnny didn’t protest. “See you tomorrow.”

Another day, another fistful of crumpled dollars and five hundred words of random writing in the Vega
, Johnny thought.
Time to get to work for real.

2

Johnny’s drafty first floor efficiency was efficient in a “please pardon the holes in the walls, and the building superintendent promised to fix the ceiling and yes, those are mouse holes and no I don’t want to get a cat because that will cost me an extra ten bucks a month” kind of way.

The previous tenant, Johnny had learned, had a nasty temper, and fought the plaster walls with his fists, losing on most nights. His walls looked like Swiss cheese and often flaked off in chunks whenever heavy machinery would rumble by on Williamson Road, twenty feet from Johnny’s only window. The previous tenant had also evidently had a beef with suspended ceilings, the panels either missing or torn, but had been on friendly terms with the mice, who left their pellets around the efficiency in paths resembling the Appalachian Trail some fifteen miles to the west.

Johnny didn’t mind the mess. As long as he had his “Writer’s Pad,” he was happy.

He had rescued an ancient dot-matrix printer from a Dumpster, tinkering with it until it returned to its
clickity-zzzz-clickity
glory. He used a syringe to refill its sole black ink cartridge, a cartridge the dweebs at OfficeMax couldn’t identify.