The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written (9 page)

“
Yes.”

“
Oh.”

“
Is that all you can say? Oh? Oh?” Gunn suddenly had that strange feeling of déjà vu and knew that he had lived before as a praying mantis, even though he didn’t believe in reincarnation or particularly like praying mantises because of their close biological relationships to termites and cockroaches.

The T-Rexes and flying dinosaurs had returned to befuddle Cat’s mind. They mistook her singed red head for a nice geranium to munch upon.

“
Huh?” Gunn, the incorrigible rogue, said for the umpteenth time.

Johnny knew that words like “umpteenth,” “rogue,” and “incorrigible” were required to appear in every romance novel ever written. He was oh so happy he had put them all in the same sentence!

Once again, Johnny hit a dead end, but he found his solution more quickly this time:

“
We need to talk,” Cat said.

“
We are talking.”

“
Oh. Yeah. Sorry about saying ‘oh’ so often.”

“
Huh?”

“
What?” Cat was flusterated.

What’s with the red line under “flusterated”?
Johnny thought.
It is
so
a word! I heard someone say it to me just the other evening on a delivery. “I am so flusterated at you!” the woman screamed. I thought it was pretty clever. “Flustered” plus “frustrated” equals “flusterated”. I’m leaving it in.
Johnny pressed on.

Gunn was flusterated, too, and without another “huh,” he stormed out, got in Cat’s Geo Storm

Wait,
Johnny thought.
I blew up that one. Here’s an easy fix.

Gunn was flusterated, too, and without another ‘huh,’ he stormed out, got in Cat’s new Geo Storm, went to the last Blockbuster on earth that still rented movies and didn’t have a Starbucks attached to it, rented
Storm of the Century
, and spent a stormy night a-low-un in his secret crash pad across town
.

Johnny frowned.
Do I describe the secret crash pad in detail? Of course not! Then it wouldn’t be a secret. Duh.

The next day, Gunn felt something like guilt. It reminded him of the time he ate too much Halloween candy and his stomach felt like the
Hindenburg
before it exploded in New Jersey in 1937, oh the humanity! It reminded him of the time he set fire to the class gerbil, only no one noticed since the gerbil usually smelled pretty bad and ate its own poo. It also reminded him of Spam for some reason, though he never eaten Spam in his life.

Thus, out of guilt he couldn’t completely explain, Gunn bought flowers for Cat to mend the tremendous rift between them caused by the dreaded but as-yet-purchased Pomeranian. These weren’t just any flowers, however. They were nice flowers, and he bought these nice flowers at a florist called, aptly, Nice Flowers. They smelled like roses even though they looked like daisies. He supposed that Nice Flowers kept all their nice flowers in the same nice refrigerator. He hated when his food smelled like other food. A single onion left in the fridge turned his milk oniony. One time a moldy piece of cheese made his lettuce taste cheesy. It was a good thing Gunn’s condiments came in several thousand sealed fast food packets.

“
Here are your peonies, sir,” the girl said.

Johnny knew he didn’t have to name “the girl.” She was the generic checkout chick, and every reader would recognize that.
Who says you have to name every person in every story? I mean, look at
War and Peace.
If Tolstoy didn’t name every character, you might actually be able to follow the plot.
Johnny continued their dialogue.

“
Peonies?”

“
Yes, peonies.”

“
I can’t tell my soul mate, ‘I want to make up with you, here are your peonies!’” Gunn yelled tellingly.

“
You picked out peonies, sir,” the girl said in a picky manner.

“
I want roses!” Gunn howled rosily. “I said, ‘Give me those roses there’!”

“
You pointed at the peonies, sir, so I wrapped up peonies,” the girl said pointedly.

“
You knew what I meant,” Gunn said knowingly in the past tense.

“
I do not have ESP, sir,” the girl said using her sixth sense.

“
Oh.” Gunn wrinkled up his incorrigible rogue’s face. “Well, I want roses, every last rose you have! All of them!” He pointed at some long yellow flowers.

“
Those are daffodils, sir,” the girl said in a daffy and dilly manner.

“
Just roses! Spare no expense for my sugar muffin!” Gunn bawled expensively.

The girl smiled a smiley smile full of smiles. “Is she your sweetie?”

“
Yes.” Gunn stood tall. “Cat Mann is my snookums, my boo, my sweetest, my girl, my main squeeze, my honey, my darling, my treasure, my truelove, my sweet patootie, my inamorata.”

Johnny smiled.
What do you know?
Thesauruses can be useful after all.
He cracked his knuckles and continued typing.

“
Oooooooh, you are a dream,” the girl cooed dreamily. “Are you foreign?”

Gunn flexed every muscle in his body and gave himself some severe cramps in the bottoms of his feet and just under his third rib. “I am a man of the world.”

The girl flushed with romantically romantic feelings of romance and wished that she, too, could have a man of the world who was clueless about flowers and spared no expense for his sweet patootie. Her life just plain sucked like a calf sucking on its mama’s teat, only not as milky or freaking gross.

“
Do you have a brother?” she asked in a brotherly way. “I mean, gosh, if I can’t marry you, maybe I can marry your brother and make you some nieces and nephews.”

“
Sorry, my dear girl,” Gunn said in a dearly sorry way. “I have no brother. They killed him!”

“
Who killed him?”

Gunn looked down on the little waif. “You’re much too young for such tales of woe, my child.”

“
I’m eighteen.”

“
Oh, in that case, you don’t need an adult present. They killed my brother Herb about ten years ago in Amsterdam.”

“
What happened?”

Gunn felt suddenly full of angst. “I do not want to talk about it.”

The girl pouted and decided to have a meaningless conversation with a pizza delivery guy later that night.

“
Oh, and can you remove all the thorns from the roses for me?” Gunn asked thornily.

A few minutes later, the girl’s hands completely punctured and bloody and therefore unattractive to even the most desperate pizza delivery guy, Gunn drove the new Geo Storm to his house, ninety-two dozen roses packed into the back seat.

Johnny did some math and decided that 1,104 roses would so fit in the back of a Geo Storm, but only if Gunn drove with all the windows open.
I don’t want to get any hate mail from readers fussing over the bleeding roses, as if any of them had every put over a thousand roses into the back of anything.

On his drive home, Gunn planned the fireworks to come. He’d say, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” and Cat would purr and say, “Meow.” She would then slink across the floor on her hands and knees in the Catwoman suit she wore to protect her second- and third-degree burns. Then she’d rub her back against his legs. “Have you been a good kitty or a naughty kitty?” he’d ask, and she’d say, “Meow” again, only this time very cattily.

Suddenly, his romantic thoughts were interrupted by

Johnny interrupted himself.
By what? By reality? By a coherent thought? By real fireworks?
Johnny shook his head, finally realizing that it was just as hard to keep a relationship going in a book as it was in real life. He heard a siren somewhere in the distance.

He smiled and deleted the previous phrase.

Suddenly, sirens interrupted Gunn’s romantic thoughts. Miles of police tape circled his mansion like little, thin, yellow, plastic children playing “Ring around the Rosie.” He leaped out of the new Geo Storm like a man-sized bullfrog who ate Wheaties and felt the turmoil of tumultuous emotions. He had a jillion emotions going through his mind, all of them extremely emotional and emotionally draining.

He ducked under some police tape near his porch and ran smack dab into an Irish cop named Shamus O’Malley.

“
What happened here?” Gunn asked by happenstance.

“
Is this your house?” O’Malley asked residentially with an Irish brogue, kicking his little legs together and cackling like a leprechaun.

“
Yes, this is my house,” Gunn said domestically.

“
It’s also a crime scene, lad,” O’Malley said criminally.

A crime scene! Gunn thought excitedly. Here? At my house? Today? It can’t be! I have laundry to do! “Where’s my Cat?”

“
I didn’t know you had one, so it must have run off,” O’Malley said, running his Irish mouth in a runny and offhand manner.

Gunn smiled catatonically. “I don’t have a cat, Officer O’Malley. Do I look like a cat man to you? Huh, huh, huh.”

O’Malley joined him with ironic Irish laughter gilded with angst.

“
My girlfriend’s name is Cat.”

“
So you’re the boyfriend?” O’Malley asked boyishly.

Gunn nodded. “I am the boyfriend. I brought her some roses.” He pointed at the back of the new Geo Storm.

Officer O’Malley looked at the roses. “They look like some empty stems to me.”

“
It was windy,” Gunn said breezily.

“
It might have had something to do with you having the windows open,” O’Malley said openly. “Son, we need to talk.”

Gunn blinked fifty times in a minute, the international sign that he was totally clueless, confused, nervous, or had something in his eye. He was glad he wasn’t a parrot (twenty-six blinks per minute), a newborn baby (two blinks per minute), or an ostrich (one blink per minute), and that calmed him somewhat, but he couldn’t stop thinking thoughtful thoughts.

Is Officer O’Malley my long-lost father?
Gunn thought.
He called me his son just now! Am I Irish? Is it why I like the color green so much? Is it why I root for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team even though those guys come in as blue chip NFL prospects and go out as undrafted free agents thanks to horrendous coaching by guys who look like Rodney Dangerfield? Is it why I like women who have green eyes? Is it why I think little people live under stairs, eat cereal filled with marshmallows, and have magical powers? Is it why I prefer weeping to laughing, wool to cotton, and redheads to brunettes? Is it why I want to be the middleweight boxing champion of the world someday?

“
Are you my father, Officer O’Malley?” Gunn asked paternally.

“
No, son,” O’Malley said, suddenly full of darkness.

“
Dad?”

Officer O’Malley took a little silver flask, which magically never emptied, from his pocket and inhaled a long swig of Irish whiskey. “‘Son’ is just a stereotypical Irish cop expression designed to keep you calm before I tell you some really, seriously awful, you’re gonna be really, really angry bad news.”

“
Oh.” Gunn had a sinking feeling. That’s when he realized that he needed to replace a few sagging boards on his porch.
Lousy contractors,
Gunn thought.
Always substituting inferior 6.0 Eastern white pine when they run out of Western red cedar.