Money, Love
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Stephen Ambrose
Children's Authors
Stan and Jan Berenstain |
Behind the Book
BY BRAD BARKLEY
I'm angry now, the dripping hiss continues, I'm on in 15 minutes, and all I want is a blasted cup of coffee, which of course is sitting right there, waiting for me to drink it. The kid yawns. I put my hands on my hips, trying to look like having a book in B&N's Discover Great Writers Program gives me the power to have him fired, to see to it that he never works in coffee again. Guests start arriving, filling the plastic chairs. Finally, the sound of brewing grows quiet, and when it does I realize my mistake, take my now-warm coffee and slink away, wondering if the kid thinks this is my usual method of making a purchase: standing around peevishly for seven minutes before finally claiming it. As I take my spot at the podium, I'm thinking about Thomas Wolfe's famous claim that You Can't Go Home Again. As a kid I would answer the book title, saying things like, "Sure you can. Just hop on a bus!" But here I am, home again and not, standing in a spot I remember from when it was only a stand of pines separating a golf course and a car wash. The chairs are filling up, partly, with my parents and their friends, an elderly aunt, all among the faithful in the Baptist church. I know already they will not like the book because it contains bad words such as "damn," and "Democrat." Soon, all my carefully planned paranoia starts paying off. I read from the first chapter of my comic novel, and—having read at other events—know where to slow for laughs. I pause for the first one and I'm met with, well, a pause, and I pretend I have just lost my place (I always grin expectantly when I lose my place). It continues, my best lines met with a waxy silence, and I feel myself slowly morphing into Rodney Dangerfield. Sweat trickles down my back, and I start cutting lines as I go so as not to prolong the agony. One person smiles politely, but the rest look frozen, like Dan Quayle in a debate. Ten minutes after I start, half the time of an ordinary reading, I'm done. I want to leave. I think about going to a bar and standing around looking angry for seven minutes before downing several shots. On the wall is one of those giant B&N woodcut prints of Thomas Wolfe, glaring down at me, saying, "I told you so." Then they are upon me, the friends of my parents, my elderly aunt. They congratulate me, ask me to sign books. They seem happy to be there, all smiles now, and I realize that from their way of seeing it, it's not that you can't go home, it's that you can't leave home. For them, it doesn't matter that I'm an author with a new novel, that the book is doing well, that I'm headed to New York the next week where the bookstore crowds will laugh at the right places. I'm only the kid who used to mow their lawns, who got dunked in their baptismal pool, who was so shy and polite when they spoke to me. They can act proud of the fact that I've written a book without even liking or understanding it. Or reading it. I imagine them taking their copies home, hanging them on the fridge with a magnet. So I look at Thomas Wolfe, thinking maybe his version of things is not the whole truth. But I bet he had no problems ordering coffee.
North Carolina native Brad Barkley's first novel is Money, Love which follows the hilarious misadventures of a
teenage boy recruited to join his father's get-rich-quick schemes.
Author photo by M. Moran.
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Twenty minutes before my first reading in North Carolina, I'm standing in
Barnes & Noble, frightening the coffee guy. He puts my regular-two-creams on
the counter, takes my money, makes change, but does so with such speed that
I decide this must be an empty cup, that he's waiting for coffee to brew.
This theory is bolstered by the dripping, steamy sound behind him. So I
wait. The counter guy, a skinny kid with a humorless face, leans against the
counter, affecting disdain. I look at the cup. I look at him. The cup sits
between us, like the last canteen of water in some spaghetti western.