The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written (4 page)

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.

The mice in his apartment had not disagreed.

These thoughts of garbage led him to contemplate life, which led Johnny to thoughts of
It’s a Wonderful Life,
the Christmas holiday classic playing since late October on seemingly every freaking channel on the television. Johnny had wondered why Hollywood hadn’t rewritten and ruined this movie classic with a remake of some kind. After reading the screenplay for
Rambo III
and deciding that screenplays were pitifully easy to write, he wrote a simple, heartfelt treatment for
It’s a Wonderful Death
:

Here we are in 2004. GEORGE BAILEY and his friends are riding stolen skateboards through a strip mall in Bedford Falls, New York. GEORGE does a fancy move on the railing down some concrete stairs. Oh, he’s landed on his privates. His friends, of course, are filming it to embarrass him later on YouTube. There’s his brother HARRY trying the same maneuver and rolling out of control into the path of two speeding cars, one a taxi driven by ERNIE, the other a police car driven by BERT. GEORGE pushes HARRY out of the path of both cars, but BERT’s police cruiser hammers GEORGE into unconsciousness. Close-up of blood on the bumper. Standard “Is he dead or just faking it so he can sue me, the department, the state, and the country?” speech by BERT. Ten seconds will pass before a friend uploads the entire event to YouTube, where it will be famous for about a minute.

Thirty-four minutes pass until the ambulance arrives.

GEORGE will spend a year in the hospital recovering from his injuries and will be deaf in his left ear for the rest of his life. A judge will throw out the lawsuit MA BAILEY files against the known universe since GEORGE had been committing a misdemeanor at the time.

Here we are in 2005. GEORGE works for OLD MAN GOWER in a rundown pharmacy about to put out of business by the CVS Corporation. GOWER’s pharmacy, however, is really a front for an Oxycontin-dealing operation. GEORGE is GOWER’s delivery boy and discovers before a delivery to the Diphtheria gang that GOWER has laced the Oxycontin accidentally with strychnine instead of Johnson’s Baby Powder. GOWER beats the brakes off GEORGE, puncturing GEORGE’s right eardrum, but GOWER shouts “Thank you, George Bailey!” at the top of his lungs anyway.

GEORGE only blinks because he is now essentially deaf.

Here we are in 2011. GEORGE attends HARRY’s graduation party. GEORGE dances with MARY, fresh from her third try at rehab. MARY is drunk and thinks colors are speaking Portuguese to her and that Tony the Tiger is real and even kind of handsome when you look at him sideways. MARY doesn’t notice that GEORGE is the biggest dork at the party and finds GEORGE strangely attractive, though he reminds her of a buck-toothed donkey. GEORGE and MARY throw themselves from the stage into the crowd, but no one catches them. Others quickly jump on them, beating them into the floor. MARY loses both of her contacts and then thinks GEORGE looks like a young George Clooney.

On the way home, GEORGE and MARY sing “Buffalo Gals,” the “new” profanity-laced, female-demeaning rap song (sure to win a Grammy) climbing the charts, and then vandalize a condemned mansion. GEORGE spray-paints a moon on a wall for no apparent reason. MARY, who is still tipsy, does a little streaking, which GEORGE thinks is “very interesting” because this isn’t the 1970s. GEORGE later joins MARY in the hydrangea bushes for a little serious necking. GEORGE gets a rash.

The year is 2018. GEORGE is running from the law after UNCLE BILLY has stolen $500,000 from the Bailey Building and Loan to pay off a loan shark in Las Vegas. GEORGE goes to the evil Henry POTTER, Harry Potter’s real father, and begs for help. POTTER tells GEORGE that the building and loan isn’t on the list to be bailed out by the government, that GEORGE is worth more dead than alive, and that nobody really ever liked him because he was such a foolish dork for staying in Bedford Falls instead of traveling the world and becoming an architectural engineer and bridge builder.

So GEORGE leaps off a bridge and dies. On the way down he wonders if he could have built a better bridge.

Johnny sat back from his laptop and sighed. Though his remake had merit, it didn’t have that certain extra “something” Hollywood was looking for. He had the obligatory blood, romance, and violence. He had the incredible string of “true-to-life” coincidences. He even had the slam-bang, ironic ending for folks wearing black turtlenecks to discuss afterwards over foul-smelling wine and stinky cheese.

Johnny put his only attempt at a screenplay in the “Garbage” file and did some thinking. He did this every so often when he wasn’t too busy avoiding life. He eventually thought, of all things, about something his adoptive father Phil once told him: “Do as I say, not as I do.” This thought shot off on a tangent to his eighth grade gym class where he heard Coach Phyllis say, “Those who can’t play, coach.” Fine-tuning this tangent, he clearly heard his eleventh grade English teacher Mrs. Phillips say, “Those who can’t write, teach English.”

He mulled these seemingly random statements in his head for some time until he had an epiphany of epic proportions.

Johnny almost shouted, but he was worried that his neighbor soaking in the bathtub above him would fart, the sound reminding Johnny of a trombone.

What,
Johnny thought deeply,
could I write that I know absolutely nothing about? There are writers all throughout history who have written what they have never done or never could do. That is what I should be writing. That will be my meal ticket out of this—

The mice had begun their nocturnal march past his desk, several hugging the walls near the baseboards. “There are some lovely cracker crumbs in the kitchen,” Johnny told them, “so leave me alone tonight, okay?”

The mice looked at him with swarthy, mousy faces.

Yes. I must use my complete imagination to—

The mice paused and seemed to blink at him.

“
No, seriously, and they’re Ritz crackers, I swear.”

I have to write something I know
nothing
about.

He flipped through that ancient literary agents guide to the back, scanning the genres until he came to—

He smiled.

He nodded.

He chortled.

The mice squinted at him as only mice can.

“
I am going to write a romance,” he said to the mice, which were still at his feet and seemed to be waiting for more than cracker crumbs tonight. “It will be a bestseller.”

The mice didn’t look so sure. These particular jaded mice had heard it all before.

“
No, really,” Johnny said. “I am going to write the best romance ever written because I have no preconceived notions of what a romance should and should not do. I am bringing an absolutely blank slate—”

The lead mouse yawned, or at least seemed to, crossing his little hairy arms and giving Johnny a blank stare.

Johnny frowned. “You’ll see.”

The lead mouse blinked.

“
Okay, okay,” he said, standing and moving toward the kitchen, his mousy friends twelve tiny feet behind. “Just a little cheese tonight.” He opened the refrigerator and took out a container of Cost-Cutter parmesan, sprinkling it near the cracker crumbs.

The mice hesitated, seemed to raise their shoulders, and began eating.

Johnny raced to his laptop, deleted several dozen “Garbage” files to make more room on his hard disk, and stared at the blank slate of a screen.

“
This is going to be great!”

3

He first needed a romantic title that would grab readers by their jugulars, race their pulses, stop their hearts, curl their toenails, and electrify their loins. His title would have to stand out from all the other wretched and pathetic titles on the shelves. His title had to shriek, “READ MY BOOK BECAUSE OTHER BOOKS WILL GIVE YOU ACID REFLUX, DIARRHEA, AND DANDRUFF!”

He decided that one-word titles were passé, two-word titles were grandiose (especially if they began with
The
), and anything longer than three words would be completely over-the-top and might not fit on the cover. He consulted his Roget’s thesaurus for the first time ever and made a list of possible heart-stopping, mind-blowing, and bodice-ripping titles:

ABRUPT AVID ARDOR

ZANY EXCESSIVE CRAVINGS

DAFT COVETOUS YEARNINGS

NUTTY RAPACIOUS LONGINGS

WACKY INSATIABLE AMBITIONS

IMPULSIVE VORACIOUS WISHES

UNEXPECTED LOPSIDED DESIRES

MADCAP GLUTTONOUS PASSIONS

FRENZIED GUT-BUSTING HUNGERS

CHAOTIC RAVENOUS INCLINATIONS

HASTY UNBALANCED INFATUATIONS

HYPERACTIVE PREDATORY APPETITES

PASSIONATE ACQUISITIVE ASPIRATIONS

SUDDEN DISPROPORTIONATE OBSESSIONS

SPONTANEOUS UNQUENCHABLE OBJECTIVES

OFF-THE-WALL UNAPPEASABLE REQUIREMENTS

SPUR-OF-THE-MOMENT GRASPING PROCLIVITIES

Why do these titles keep getting longer?
Johnny wondered.
The last eight might not fit on the cover. I have to leave a lot of space on my cover for the longhaired European beefcake and the petite (yet buxom) lass.

None of the titles did anything but release a little gas from Johnny’s stomach and give pause to the mice licking their paws in the kitchen.
Three short, concise words,
he thought.
That’s all I need. Three words that will tell me what love is.

What is love anyway?

As if I’m an expert.