The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written Read online

  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.

  “This could be from the late seventies,” Dweeb #1 had said.

  “Man,” said Dweeb #2, “you should auction off this antique on EBay.”

  Johnny also had several boxes of rare fanfold paper, an antique writing desk held together by soda spills, nails, and gum, and his generic laptop that still ran Windows 98.

  He also had a substantial library of how-to books, all of them bought second- and third-hand. How to Sell What You Write, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creative Writing, How to Sell Your First Novel, The Everything Guide to Writing a Novel, Writing Skills in Less Than 20 Minutes a Day, How to Grow a Novel, Writing Smart, and So You Want to Publish a Romance? filled his shaky shelves.

  But they didn’t fill his mind. Johnny had yet to read anything but their front and back covers. The titles alone inspired him to greatness.

  He also had a Webster’s dictionary, a Roget’s thesaurus, a decade-old Guide to Literary Agents, and several cardboard boxes full of old Writer’s Digest magazines.

  He also had plenty of time. Once away from the smell of yeast, cheese, and Hector, Johnny devoted the wee hours of the night composing, re-composing, and decomposing stories. He had rewritten several novels so often that he didn’t recognize who wrote them, wondering if it was illegal to plagiarize himself.

  He had originally set out to write an American epic, a thick book that would win the National Book Award and one day the Nobel Prize. After learning that mainly Swedish and European authors won Nobel prizes for literature and after spending a week outlining the entire history of the United States from 1607 to the present, he decided that he didn’t know diddly about American history.

  A single page of handwritten notes just would not suffice.

  He also learned that epics were impossibly long, took many years to write, required meticulous research, were hard to publish in today’s sound-byte society, and took up entirely too much disk space on his hard drive. Writing an epic would also require more printer ink and fanfold paper unless Johnny fiddled with the margins, which a serious writer was never supposed to do.

  An action-adventure novel captured him for a while. He wrote an amalgam of bygone summer blockbuster movies called Live Free and Golden or Transform. Harley, his main character, was a robot that could transform into a 1959 FLH Custom Harley Davidson motorcycle. Harley’s best robot friend Huey could become a UH-1H Huey II helicopter. Harley, Huey, and Bob, a sea lion who summered in Juneau, Alaska, and could drive a Scorpion snowmobile without opposable thumbs, and Haley, a wisecracking nine-year-old girl, teamed up with a grizzled old retired New York City cop named John Grizzly, who cussed a lot and said “thoity” instead of “thirty.” “Oh no you don’t, you rascal!” was Grizzly’s signature line. Grizzly also never shaved and rarely had enough unfiltered cigarettes to share with his mechanical friends, though he always seemed to have a lifetime supply of bullets tucked into his eerily tight jeans. All Haley ever said was “Let’s get with the program, people” while rolling her eyes and looking notoriously cute. Harley and Huey just generally shivered, broke down, and froze in place, especially when they sensed danger. When terrorists, who all sounded like Zero Mostel and wore caftans instead of down jackets, took over the Alaskan pipeline after placing explosives on the pipeline’s entire 800-mile length without being detected even by moose, the quintet swung into action, and—

  Johnny gave up on Live Free and Golden or Transform because he had trouble working in Grizzly’s love interest, Tatiana, a hot Russian babe who had been brainwashed by the terrorists until she thought she was Lebanese.

  He found himself writing science fiction next:

  Thignokhrl-9 hated space. It was far too big for the average Dweezilian to comprehend. It was freaking huge and went in all freaking directions, like, forever, and it was easy to get lost since there were no good small maps. The best maps were several parsecs wide and never folded back together, and the directions for the Intergalactic GPS devices were usually written in Swedish. There were also few McDonalds this far from Earth, a dreary planet that at least had satellite radio, TV, trans fat, and Gilligan’s Island.

  Thignokhrl-9 also hated Dweezil, his home planet. No one on Dweezil knew the recipe for a good bowl of New England clam chowder or Ed’s Buffalo Snort Red Chili that didn’t include sand. Thignokhrl-9, nicknamed “Thiggy,” hated sand more than he hated space. Sand the flavor and aroma of blue whale coated every surface of Dweezil. Dweezilans bottled and sold the sand as kitty litter throughout the Ruta-Baga system and as a male species libido enhancer throughout the rest of the universe, especially south Florida.

  And that was Thignokhrl-9’s job. He sold intergalactic kitty litter and male species libido enhancer from the trunk of his 3027 Q-wing Vega Star Cruiser.

  Thignorkhrl-9 hated his job. He worked for Jely Rol, a three-headed Anthraxian with six rolls of blubber, who, unfortunately, preferred to wear cut-off T-shirts and didn’t believe in antiperspirant …

  Johnny next tried his hands at a western, using a copious amount of exclamation points because he believed the Old West was a loud place what with all the shooting, murdering, rustling, and marauding going on:

  Tex carefully whipped out his trusty Bowie knife, twelve inches of steely steel. “I’ll save ye, dahlin’!!!”

  “Oh, Tex!!!” she cried in a southern accent. “Yer muh hero!!!”

  Tex jumped off his fiery steed Cupcake and used his knife to deflect all six shots blasted from Evil Diesel’s Colt .45. Then Tex did a back flip over Diesel and held the seriously dented Bowie knife under Diesel’s loathsome, vile, and unshaven chin.

  “Iffen ye don’t cut it out,” Tex growled, spitting a stream of black tobacco juice on a stray horny toad’s head, “I’ll cut yer head clean off!!
!”

  “Oh, Tex!!!” she cried again.

  Tex deftly made several slicing motions in the air, reducing Evil Diesel’s black leather vest, chaps, pants, and snakeskin boots to shreds.

  “An’ let this be a lesson to ye,” Tex said with glee in his heart and a yellow grin on his face. “You cut up in muh town, and yer gonna git cut up, y’hear?!!!”

  “Oh, Tex!!!” she cried yet again.

  Johnny thought he had a good thing going until he realized that he couldn’t visualize the “her” or the “she” in anything he wrote.

  Johnny didn’t get out much.

  Since Marla had dumped him three years ago, Johnny couldn’t visualize any woman in his real life either. He was a Spartan about it, however, believing he had chosen “the write road,” a hard road, a lonely road, a road of isolation and despair, a road filled with dark nights, the smell of yeast, and the pitter-patter of little mice feet. Marla didn’t want to be on that road. She had actually wanted a house without Swiss cheese walls, a reliable car from this century, and crunch-less carpeting free of mouse M&Ms. Writing by forty-watt bulb in the wee hours and delivering doughy, unhealthy, overly oregano-ed pizza from four to midnight and beyond became Johnny’s life. He had no room for love, no room for romance, no room for even one cup of coffee with a woman.

  Johnny had, he thought, a date with destiny.

  And he wasn’t even on any form of medication.

  He had already been published—sort of. He had written a ten-page letter to a syndicated columnist asking for advice, and a truncated version had appeared in newspapers around the country: