Pocket Kings by Ted Heller Page B

reading was scheduled for a Monday evening at eight o’clock. I asked Abigail how many people might attend, and Abigail, whose job as publicist, after all, was to always spread the good word (in other words, to tell bald-faced lies about everything to everyone), told me that the room would be filled and that the joint would be quaking with laughter and applause. It would be, she said, a smashing success.
    â€œYou do this,” she threw in, “and in two weeks I’ll get you on Charlie Rose. Who knows, if the book gets a great review in the Times, which I have no doubt it will, maybe we can even get you on Oprah. ”
    â€œCharlie Rose?” I gulped. “Oprah?”
    Oh lord. Was I also television-camera-shy? I had no idea. It had never occurred to me I’d ever wind up on television and thus had no phobia prepared for it. It was as if someone was telling me I was going to be transported to another galaxy or appointed attorney-general of Burkina Faso. It just wasn’t something I had ever thought about.
    I picked the ten fastest and funniest pages of Plague and, for two weeks, rehearsed aloud for the reading. I imagined hot writer groupies melting the steel of their folding chairs as I slew them into submission. After I was finished, I merely had to point at one of them—or at two of them—and some Barnes & Noble lackey would usher the limp, damp, besotted writer-worshipper over to me.
    It was six at night, two hours before the Big Event, and I was shaving. Cynthia had picked out a suit, shirt, and tie combination for me and laid it out neatly on our bed. All I had to do was shave and shower. She would tie my tie and dimple it perfectly, as she always did.
    I rubbed hot water on my face, applied a thin layer of gel, put my razor under scalding hot water so that the blade was steaming. Th e radio, tuned to NPR, was on in the next room and I wasn’t really listening to it, but then I heard these words: “. . . Plague Boy is perhaps one of the worst and most depressing American novels to be written in decades. Not one word rings true. How this unfunny, boring, lame novel ever got published is . . .”
    At that very second the razor was making its second downward pass over facial terrain I’d already shaved and I cut myself so savagely that to this very day there is faint skin discoloration on that cheek in some spots. Th e reviewer continued and I continued shaving. He kept ripping my book and I kept ripping my skin. He even, maliciously, gave away the book’s surprise ending; up to that moment I’d thought doing that was a criminal act. (I didn’t yet know it actually was a tactic.)
    Blood was all over the sink. Th ere was blood on the floor, on my chest, over the tiles on the wall. Th ere was blood on all the toothbrushes, and soon, as I began wiping it up while still trying to listen to the radio, there was blood on about four bathroom towels. I staggered into the bedroom and blood dripped onto the suit, shirt, and tie on the bed. Cynthia brought in a roll of paper towels and we used that and then had to use another one. “He gave away the ending!” I hissed as we soaked up the blood. I had not only torn off two and a half square inches of my cheek, I had nicked my earlobe—it required ten stitches later that night— and lips and cut a trail about six inches long into one side of my visage. Th e bleeding didn’t stop. One side of my face was fine, the other looked like chunks of seared salmon.
    Cynthia lovingly smeared about a pound of Neosporin on me as, still aghast, I again said, “He gave away the ending!” and then, while she mopped up the remains, I went off—my face now the color of crushed raspberries—to Barnes & Noble to read from my first novel.
    â€œYou can’t get up there and do it,” the store manager said to me. “Not in this condition.”
    Abigail was there and couldn’t look