The Big Time

11am.  Awaiting my adoring public.

The splendor of Indian summer was in full bloom as I drove home Wednesday evening.  Having passed the traditional halfway point, I was pining for the upcoming weekend.  The unseasonably warm temperatures were forecast to climb even higher by Saturday, opening up a plethora of options not common in December.

My phone rang as I pulled into my driveway.  I didn’t recognize the number, so I let voicemail handle it. I’ve always had a strained relationship with the telephone, which is to say I don’t care for it. I miss the nonverbal cues of a face-to-face conversation and resent the dedicated attention it requires.   I tend to treat the telephone as a slightly less invasive version of the doorbell.  I feel no particular obligation to answer either. 

My wife, on the other hand, can function as if the telephone is a natural extension of her body, effortlessly adding it to a multi-tasking cocktail of conversing, cooking dinner, and helping our daughter with her homework.  The afternoon call I received was unexpected and caught me off guard. I awaited the message.   

It was from the owner of an independent bookstore.  One of my favorite stores because it stocked my book.  They’d sold out and needed more copies delivered, I imagined.  Envisioning holiday dollar signs, I played the message.   

The owner had called to invite me to participate in an in-store appearance that coming Saturday.  The dollar signs shined brighter in my imagination, and without further thought, I called back to accept the invitation.  

 

A bookstore appearance is often an easy way to move product and make some quick cash.  We were in the holiday shopping season, so traffic figured to be good, and signed books make unique gifts for those for whom buying is difficult. The work is easy.  You sit at a table, scribble your name on the title fly page, and make small talk.  It’s like being a celebrity, except I have to drive myself. And provide my own refreshments.  And Sharpie.  

I’d done an appearance at the same store earlier in the fall that was a success. If this was half as good, it would be a lucrative day.

 However, with visions of easy money and low-end celebrity inhabiting my head, I failed to consider the variables.  Competition would be stiff Saturday morning.  The University of Oklahoma football team would be playing in the conference championship game at the same time.  This was of little interest to me, but my indifference placed me in the minority. Nothing keeps people home in the autumn like a football game.  With the game taking on the added importance of being for the conference title, this figured to cut traffic significantly.

 

I should’ve known what I was in for when I couldn’t even secure any plants.  My wife and daughter had a Girl Scouts function, my mom was out of town, and my sister had attended my previous appearance and suggested I not push it.

 

And for the handful of people not interested in the football game, the aforementioned weather figured to be a powerful deterrent.  A projected high temperature in the mid-70s in early December isn’t exactly grab-a-latte-and-hang-out-in-a-bookstore weather. 

 

With limited time, I did the best I could to exploit the event–which is to say I posted about it on social media.  Saturday morning, I packed up my modest media kit and made the twenty-minute drive north to a suburban strip center.

 A moist south wind had propelled the temperature well into the 60s by 10am.  The sun-splashed freeway was virtually empty as I cruised with windows down and the music up.  Though the appearance time was only three hours in duration, I expected it to feel at least twice as long.  

 At my previous appearance, there were two authors.  Joining me was an attorney who cranked out erotic chick-lit like a ten-year-old Bangladeshi boy pulling down a dollar a week for making sneakers. She was billed as a romance author, but I think this was a euphemism.  This stuff was of the shirtless Fabio pawing a buxom breast on the cover variety, but lust isn’t an official literary category.   

 This time, I was one of four writers in the store, as history, recovery, religious self-help, and humor were represented.  What follows is a timeline of the day’s events as best as I can recollect.

 10:45 am. I park, grab my bag, and walk across the sparsely populated parking lot to the store.  The sky is cloudless, and according to my car’s thermometer, the temperature is already in the lower 60s.  Even I don’t want to be indoors. The smell of the Mexican restaurant at the end of the strip center gets in my nose.  Tacos and margaritas on the patio sound like a better idea.

 The opening associates welcome me.  Moments later, the owner emerges from her office at the rear of the store to greet me.  She is optimistic, thinking the mild weather will make for a good day.  She isn’t a football fan and has no idea what we would be competing against.  Coincidentally, the store is no longer open.  Lack of risk assessment may have been a factor.

 10:55 am. I set up my display at a folding table in the back half of the store, next to the coffee bar. A tablecloth has been provided.  I am soon joined by the other three authors on the bill.  A gregarious man a few years older than me, there to promote his new history book, facilitated introductions.   As the humor writer, I tend to orbit outside the circle of legitimacy, sent to the side with my jester’s hat and bauble.

11:00 am.  An associate unlocks the door but nobody enters.  My fellow writers and I check our watches and look at the undisturbed front door.  Like taking possession of a new car, our optimism depreciates immediately.

11:36 am. The bell chimes to signify the opening of the door.  We all spin our heads like eager dogs awaiting our masters’ return.  A woman enters and leaves after a brief conversation with the associate at the counter.

11:48 am. A couple enters the store and meanders to the coffee bar.  I can see their neck muscles straining to keep their heads from turning and making eye contact with any of us.  They each get a venti latte and a scone and take the long way back to the door to avoid passing in front of us.

11:53 am. The historian’s gregariousness starts to wear on me when he hands us each a pamphlet detailing another of his side hustles.  I reposition myself in the conversation from outlier to uninvolved.

11:58 am. A middle-aged couple enters the store.  Again, our collective eyes turn toward them with desperate anticipation. They browse for several minutes, making sure to steer clear of our side of the room.  

12:04 pm. The middle-aged couple exits without making a purchase.

12:05 pm. Denial 

It is obvious that the day is well on its way to becoming a bust.  My fellow writers make one last push at optimism. “People must be getting a late start,” one muses.  “After lunch, surely the crowd will pick up,” adds another. The optimism is nothing more than veiled denial.  We are firmly ensconced in stage one of grief.  We grieve the fast-approaching death of our literary careers.  

12:06 pm. I receive separate texts from two friends who planned to come to the store but now claim they are too busy to make it. In the exchange, both mention being bored.  I try not to take the blatant contradiction personally.

12:10 pm. My fellow authors offer their first display of agitation.  They begin asking where the customers are.  Our appearance becomes reminiscent of the record store scene in This is Spinal Tap.

12:15 pm. I commit an etiquette breach by pulling out my phone to combat drowsiness.

12:37 pm. A friend of mine enters the store with his wife.  After scanning the room, they walk back to where I am sitting.  We have a short conversation and they each buy a book and have me sign both copies.

1:00 pm. I am leading the unofficial sales competition, two-nil.  With the wind blowing in, my two-spot has a strong chance of holding up.

1:05 pm. We have seen precious few customers.  The handful of people who have entered the store have treated us like a row of homeless persons sitting on a sidewalk, impoverished hands outstretched.  Instead of cardboard signs, we hold books.  We don’t want handouts; we want readers.  Anything helps.  God bless.  

1:13 pm. The spirituality author becomes restless and neurotic concerning her drive home.  She’d traveled from a small town to be with us and had become preoccupied with finding the best route home.  Given her level of paranoia, one might think a dusk ice storm was imminent, but her concern was with “big city traffic.”  She considers packing up early to get a jump on the nonexistent congestion. I consider buying the self-help lady’s book.  However, a purchase would put me in the red for the day and I decide against it.  Besides, she openly doubts God’s willingness to see her home safely.  I don’t need the ambiguity. 

1:25 pm. If this were an election, the decision desk would declare me the winner with 75% of the polls reporting.  My two-book lead feels insurmountable in the unspoken competition.  I check my phone again and ponder the ways I might spend my take from the $32 in the register that I’m directly responsible for.

1:32 pm. Anger 

It’s been a long time coming, but my fellow authors reach stage two, with a generous side portion of second-guessing.  Snide comments are exchanged as a result of the lousy turnout and lack of sales. This quickly descends into a dogpile takedown of the day, the owner, and the store. They all suck. Promotion was inadequate and our time was wasted.

 “I guess we could’ve taken turns twirling signs on the side of the freeway,” I offer.  Nobody is sure if I’m being facetious or not.

1:34 pm. Bargaining 

This phase is skipped.  Nobody is in the mood.  The non-event can only end one way.

1:35 pm. Depression 

After more pointless bitching from my colleagues, I expand my field from humorist to voice of reason, mentioning the weather and football game provided stiff competition.  “What football game?” was the response. Depression takes root. We all stare out the windows, prisoners of our overvalued ambitions.

1:47 pm. Acceptance 

We are obscure characters operating in a dying medium.  Writers can’t compete with football in Oklahoma.  Or a lot of other things.

2:02 pm 

I pack up to leave. Regardless of the current, more accepted cultural meaning, carrying an armload of unsold books back to your car is the real walk of shame. I throw my bag in the backseat and drive home. 

It was not the type of day I’d hoped for, but the kind I’d expected.  We’d been unwittingly set up for failure.  I didn’t see it as a complete waste though.  I drove home into the bright sunshine with the windows down, enjoying the gorgeous afternoon with the notion I’d have something new to write about. Plus, in the mail next week, I’d be getting a check for nineteen bucks.

The big time indeed.

 

 

Light traffic, soft sales, heavy eyes.

In Bed and Streaming: An Itch Best Not Scratched

Poison Ivy II: Lily is the second installment in the Poison Ivy tetralogy. Like its urushiol-laden botanical namesake, it's annoying, itchy, and leaves you craving a hot shower. This particular film is noteworthy for being among the direct-to-video films marking Alyssa Milano's transition from Samantha Micelli into more adult roles (read: topless scenes). Poison Ivy II is considered to be an erotic thriller which is a more artistic way of promising sex and death.

Samantha!

The second installment follows the basic blueprint of its predecessor–a younger woman seduces an older man, leaving a wake of domestic strife, jealousy, and ultimately death by falling. However, there is a clear trajectory with each installment of the series. Instead of Drew Barrymore ruining Tom Skerrit’s life in the original, Alyssa Milano ruins Xander Berekely’s. In subsequent volumes, it’s Jamie Pressley and Greg Vaughn and finally, Miriam McDonald and Greg Evigan (sans The Bear).

Milano plays the titular (emphasis on the first syllable) Lily, an attractive but naive college Kalamazoo, Michigan. She takes a bus to Southern California to study art at a prestigious college with a kick-ass art department. The house she shares with other students looks like a Bohemian compound, complete with graffiti-covered walls and overgrown vegetation.

Anyway, Lily arrives at the commune as The Billy White Trio's "Diamond" plays (!). She immediately runs into a dude named Gredin. Vaguely resembling Edwin from I Mother Earth, Gredin sports a permanent five o’clock shadow, a terrible bleach job, earrings, and a motorbike, hence rendering him the campus bad boy. Gredin’s artistic specialty is weld sculpture, and he spends his time away from class in the backyard, working on his piece de la resistance, a crude replica of The Stanford Dish made entirely of discarded, or found as they say in the ateliers, metal alloys. A close-up of Gredin wearing sunglasses while sitting on his motorbike foreshadows what we all know will inevitably happen–an early hook-up, a bitter falling out, and reconciliation.

Gredin helps Lily to her room, lugging her bags through the weeds and refuse, some of which he collects to use for his sculpture. At the house, she meets her roommates–Tanya, the bitchy lesbian, Bridgette, the bitchy dancer, and Robert, the bitchy cellist who wears a black bucket hat and looks like James Iha had he been with The Cure instead of The Smashing Pumpkins.

The ace of the faculty is Donald Falk, an art teacher who no longer produces art. We later find out he’s sworn it off because his wife Angela thinks it makes him crazy. He also has a sordid habit of banging his students, which likely also makes him loco. Judging by the work displayed in their home, he was either an abstractionist or a terrible artist. Donald at a glance resembles General Zod from Superman II until he puts on his time-stamp round glasses that transform him into a movie-of-the-week version of Maurice Gibb.

When you lose control and you got no soul...tragedy!

Like the other males (and possibly the lesbian) Donald takes an immediate shine to Lily and becomes progressively creepier. This is much to the chagrin of Gredin who warns Lily of Donald’s history.

Back in her room, Lily finds a box of junk once belonging to Ivy–including her diary--not the sort of thing you leave behind, but what the hell? Inspired by this discovcut two inches off her hair to which everyone responds as though she's a Manson Girl shaving her head.

Lily accepts a gig babysitting at the Falk home, and in doing so, allows Donald another cliche. Not only is he hot for female students, but he’s also hot for the babysitter. That Lily fills both roles is a convenience. Add the convertible and you've got yourself a midlife caricature.

While it’s difficult to select the dumbest part of this movie, I’m going with the scene between Lily and Donald in the studio–where Donald claims to be every afternoon, not working. What ensues is a ridiculous melodramatic conversation about art, sacrifice, and facing one’s demons. Donald speaks as though becoming an artist is on par with paratrooping into enemy territory in broad daylight carrying only a Randall knife and a canteen of warm water. With no back-up.

Lily calls Donald on his bullshit (her term), claiming he has no place to speak of what art takes when he’s hung up his fan brush. Lily proposes a quid pro quo in which she and Donald will help each other face their demons--sort of an artists-with-benefits arrangement.

Donald jumps at the proposal like a hungry dog descending upon a fallen hamburger. He then pulls out an easel and a sketch pad and begins sketching Lily. This is a ruse to get her naked–sacrifice yourself, damn it. Face your demons, girl, and, let me face your tits. Lily acquiesces, driven by Ivy’s diary. Donald carries on, driven by his cock, and renders a crap charcoal sketch of Lily.

I'm going to show you my 'oh,' I mean sketching face.

Concurrent lover’s triangles ensue with Lily bouncing back and forth between Gredin and Donald, while Donald rekindles the fires of infidelity while remaining with an increasingly suspicious wife.

A big Halloween party is announced and Bridgette goes out to the Stanford Dish to let Gredin know.  Lily sees the invitation, which concludes with a hug, and assumes sex is involved.  Feeling jilted, she decides to attend the party dressed as a hooker, adding black lipstick, piercing her belly button, and smoking a cigarette.  This leads her roommates to conclude she is tweaking. 

The party makes the McAlbertsons' soiree in Midnight Cowboy look like a seven-year-old's birthday party.

Meanwhile, Lily sees Gredin dancing with another girl and goes full-on ho bag, planting a wet one on the lips of a partygoer wearing a mask. This turns out to be Robert.  Upon discovering his identity, Lily reacts as though she’s been playing tonsil hockey with Quasimodo.  All the while, Donald sits in his convertible and spies through the window, cementing his status as Creepy Creeperson.

It is revealed that Donald is a serial philanderer and he then claims Lily makes him feel like he’s never felt before. Yeah, right.  Bang time.  Afterward, Lilly experiences fuckers’ remorse and treks out to the Stanford Dish to apologize to Gredin again.  They become a couple.  

In a highly contrived scene to get all the characters in the same house for the final act, Angela invites Lily to Thanksgiving, though she suspects she’s screwing Donald.  Lily brings a date, her now-boyfriend Gredin, who hates Donald and vice-versa.  Dinner is understandably awkward with the two men bickering in passive-aggressive fashion.  

After dinner, the Falk's young daughter, Daphna, asks her dad and her babysitter to put her to bed. Once this is done, Donald gets aggressive with Lily in the hallway, forcing himself on her. Daphna pops out of her room and sees her dad trying to rape her babysitter, understandably loses her shit, and runs out of the house and into the street, teddy bear in tow.

What happens next is straight out of an old driver’s education video.  The child runs into the street, the driver’s eyes bulge, the tires screech, and the teddy bear flies in the air.  While their child lies bleeding in the street, Donald and Angela engage in a donnybrook, leaving Gredin to attend to her before acting as third man in and slugging Donald.  For her part, Lily had already fled, running back to her room to pack up her Ivy paraphernalia, finally concluding that slutting and homewrecking are not all they’re cracked up to be.  

Gredin catches up with Lily back at the house to tell her that Daphna will be alright.  An intruder then bashes Gredin over the head and comes after Lily.  It’s Donald gone crazy (he is, after all, working on his art again).  

Donald and Gredin have a punch-up, with Donald getting the upper hand.  Robert drops his cello long enough to inform Donald that the fuzz has been called and is en route.  Robert is then shoved down a flight of stairs by Donald.  His cello is spared.

As this is a Poison Ivy movie, Donald and Lily end up on the roof, where Donald slips and falls to his death.  Erotic.  Thriller. Lily again apologizes to Gredin at the Standford Dish, blaming the diary for her vicarious slutting.  He accepts the explanation and they live happily ever after–or until winter break.