our share of Batman movies, we knew that Evil with a capital E stalked the world, but we never expected that it would suddenly, intently turn its attention to our happy household or that this evil would be drawn to us by a book I had written.
Having done a twenty-city tour for each of my previous novels, I persuaded my publisher to spare me that ordeal for One O’Clock Jump.
Consequently, on publication day, a Tuesday in early November, I got up at three o’clock in the morning to brew a pot of coffee and to repair to my first-floor study. Unshaven, in pajamas, I undertook a series of thirty radio interviews, conducted by telephone, between 4:00 and 9:30 A.M., which began with morning shows on the East Coast.
Radio hosts, both talk-jocks and traditional tune-spinners, do better interviews than TV types. Rare is the TV interviewer who has read your book, but eight of ten radio hosts will have read it.
Radio folks are brighter and funnier, too—and often quite humble. I don’t know why this last should be true, except perhaps the greater fame of facial recognition, which comes with regular television exposure, encourages pridefulness that ripens into arrogance.
After five hours on radio, I felt as though I might vomit if I heard myself say again the words One O’Clock Jump. I could see the day coming when, if I was required to do much publicity for a new book, I would write it but not allow its publication until I died.
If you have never been in the public eye, flogging your work like a carnival barker pitching a freak show to the crowd, this publish-only-after-death pledge may seem extreme. But protracted self-promotion drains something essential from the soul, and after one of these sessions, you need weeks to recover and to decide that one day it might be all right to like yourself again.
The danger in writing but not publishing was that my agent, Hudson “Hud” Jacklight, receiving no commissions, would wait only until three unpublished works had been completed before having me killed to free up the manuscripts for marketing.
And if I knew Hud as well as I thought I did, he would not arrange for a clean shot to the back of the head. He would want me to be tortured and dismembered in such a flamboyant fashion that he could make a rich deal for one of his true-crime clients to write a book about my murder.
If no publisher would pay a suitably immense advance for a book about an unsolved killing, Hud would have someone framed for it. Most likely Penny, Milo, and Lassie.
Anyway, after the thirtieth interview, I rose from my office chair and, reeling in self-disgust, made my way to the kitchen. My intention was to eat such an unhealthy breakfast that my guilt over the cholesterol content would distract me from the embarrassment of all the self-promotion.
Dependable Penny had delayed her breakfast so she could eat with me and hear all of the incredibly witty things I wished I had said in those thirty interviews. In contrast to my tousled hair, unshaven face, and badly rumpled pajamas, she wore a crisp white blouse and lemon-yellow slacks, and as usual her skin glowed as though it were translucent and she were lit from inside.
As I entered the room, she was serving blueberry pancakes, and I said, “You look scrumptious. I could pour maple syrup on you and eat you alive.”
“Cannibalism,” Milo warned me, “is a crime.”
“It’s not a worldwide crime,” I told him. “Some places it’s a culinary preference.”
“It’s a crime,” he insisted.
Between his fifth and sixth birthdays, Milo had decided on a career in law enforcement. He said that too many people were lawless and that the world was run by thugs. He was going to grow up and do something about it.
Lots of kids want to be policemen. Milo intended to become the director of the FBI and the secretary of defense, so that he would be empowered to dispense justice to evildoers both at home and abroad.
Here on the brink of World War Waxx, Milo perched on a dinette chair, elevated by a thick foam pillow because he was diminutive for his age. Blue block letters on his white T-shirt spelled COURAGE.
Later, the word on his chest would seem like an omen.
Having finished his breakfast long ago, my bright-eyed son was nursing a glass of chocolate milk and reading a comic book. He could read at college level, though his interests were not those of either a six-year-old or a frat boy.
“What trash is this?” I asked, picking up the comic.
“Dostoyevsky,” he said.
Frowning at the cover illustration, I wondered, “How can they condense Crime and Punishment into a comic book?”
Penny said, “It comes as a boxed set of thirty-six double-thick issues. He’s on number seven.”
Returning the comic to Milo, I said, “Maybe the question should be—why would they condense Crime and Punishment into a comic book?”
“Raskolnikov,” Milo solemnly informed me, tapping a page of the illustrated classic with one finger, “is a totally confused guy.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
I sat at the table, picked up a squeeze bottle of liquid butter, and hosed my pancakes.
“Trying to bury the shame of self-promotion under cholesterol guilt?” Penny asked.
“Exactly.”
From across the dinette, Lassie watched me butter the flapjacks. She is not permitted to sit at the table with us; however, because she refuses to live entirely at dog level, she is allowed a chair at a four-foot remove, where she can observe and feel part of the family at mealtimes.
For such a cute dog, she is often surprisingly hard to read. She has a poker face. She was not drooling. She rarely did. She was less obsessed with food than were most dogs.
Instead, she cocked her head and studied me as if she were an anthropologist and I were a member of a primitive tribe engaged in an inscrutable ritual.
Maybe she was amazed that I proved capable of operating as complex a device as squeeze-bottle butter with a flip-up nozzle. I have a reputation for incompetence with tools and machines.
For instance, I am no longer permitted to change a punctured tire. In the event of a flat, I am required to call the automobile club and get out of their way when they arrive.
I will not explain why this is the case, because it’s not a particularly interesting story. Besides, when I got to the part about the monkey dressed in a band uniform, you would think I was making up the whole thing, even though my insurance agent could confirm the truth of every detail.
God gave me a talent for storytelling. He didn’t think I would also need to have the skill to repair a jet engine or build a nuclear reactor from scratch. Who am I to second-guess God? Although…it would be nice to be able to use a hammer or a screwdriver at least once without a subsequent trip to the hospital emergency room.
Anyway, just as I raised the first bite of butter-drenched pancakes to my mouth, the telephone rang.
“Third line,” Penny said.
The third is my direct business line, given only to my editors, publishers, agents, and attorneys.
I put down the still-laden fork, got up, and snared the wall phone on the fourth ring, before the call went to voice mail.
Olivia Cosima, my editor, said, “Cubby, you’re a trouper. I hear from publicity, the radio interviews were brilliant.”
“If brilliant means I made a fool of myself slightly less often than I expected to, then they were brilliant.”
“Every writer now and then makes a fool of himself, dear. What’s unique about you is—you’ve never made a total ass of yourself.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Listen, sweetheart, I just e-mailed you three major