The Book of Joe

poster. I turn around and confirm, to my great surprise, that it’s the poster from last year’s theatrical release of Bush Falls.
    The artwork depicts a somewhat distant swimming pool framed in the bare spread legs and bikini-clad bottom of a woman standing with her back to the camera. Standing waist-deep in the water between those legs is Leonardo DiCaprio, who stares up at the unseen top half of the woman in goofy, exaggerated wonder. Beneath the photo, in a grand white script, are the words BUSH FALLS followed by the ridiculous tag line THE SUMMER JUST GOT A LITTLE BIT HOTTER.
    Owen laughed uncontrollably for a good ten minutes when he first saw the poster. “Oh, my Lord!” he exclaimed dramatically in the fake Southern accent he always trots out for just this sort of occasion. “That is just too precious!”
    “It’s cheesy,” I complained, irked by his condescension.
    “Deliciously cheesy,” he corrected me, and then collapsed into another paroxysm of full-bellied laughter. I was less than amused, wondering what Lucy Haber would think when she saw that poster.
    And now here it is, hanging inexplicably in my father’s bedroom. I stare at it intently, as if I might somehow discern the meaning of its presence by forensic analysis. Why does a father hang up the poster of a movie based on his son’s novel? The only answer that I can come up with, dumbfounding as it is, is pride. My father was proud of me. The town was in an uproar about the book when it first came out, the local papers filled with furious editorials and defensive denials from all involved in the events described. When the movie came out two years later, dozens of newsmagazines and entertainment tabloids reignited the hullabaloo as they came in droves to do stories on the town and track down the people behind the movie’s twisted characters. I was viciously derided by every person who managed to speak to a reporter.
    Sheriff Muser even tried to organize a class action lawsuit against me. And in the midst of all that furor, my father, with whom I’d barely spoken in ten years, framed and hung the movie poster in his bedroom, where he could see it every night as he climbed into bed.
    With mounting apprehension, I run downstairs and into my father’s den. There, beside the trophy case and framed basketball awards, both his and Brad’s, stands an Ikea bookcase with glass doors, in which I discover fifteen hardcover versions of Bush Falls and another twenty or so paperbacks with the movie poster pictured on the cover. Lying on top of the bookcase is a wide, flat book, which turns out to be a scrapbook, the kind they sell in stationery stores. The binding cracks loudly as I open it with shaking hands. On each page, carefully centered and glued under the protective plastic sheets, are a wide assortment of reviews of Bush Falls, everything from the New York Times to Entertainment Weekly as well as The Minuteman and some other regional papers. On the top left corner of one of t he reviews, I notice a small im print that reads “VMT Media Services.” He actually hired a clipping service to track my press. My legs become rubber, and I sit down hard on the small couch against the wall, still clutching the scrapbook in my hands. The couch smells of my father’s aftershave and pipe tobacco. “What the hell?” I say out loud as a tear runs down my cheek and lands on the brown faux leather of the scrapbook. A second tear soon follows, and then a third. I stare at those three wet spots on the cover, wondering what the hell they mean. Before I’ve come up with anything, though, sleep is on me like shrink-wrap, and the last thing I hear is the sound of the scrapbook slipping out of my fingers and landing with a gentle thud on the carpeted floor.

Fifteen
    I get my first flying book at around eight the next morning. One doesn’t instantly identify the sound of a flying book. The light, fluttering sound of airborne pages is followed by a jarring thud as the book caroms off the living room picture window and lands in the front yard. I roll off the couch in my father’s den, nauseous and without any discernible center of gravity, and peer groggily out the living room window, expecting to see another dazed or broken bird lying bewildered on the lawn. Instead, I am greeted by my own face smiling pretentiously up at me from the dust jacket of a hardcover copy of Bush Falls, which lies facedown and spread open, the upper portion of the book’s spine