The Book of Joe

Basketball League in the
    high school gym late one Friday night. According to Cindy, he’d been standing about three feet to the left of the top of the key, in what he called his sweet spot. He never missed from there. He went up for a jump shot and came down unconscious, sprawled out on the glossy hardwood floor. All the eyewitnesses, ex-jocks in varying states of decline, will forever after make a big deal out of the fact that the shot was good. Like that makes a fucking bit of difference. Sweet spot indeed.

Three
    I hang up with Cindy and instantly feel the need to call someone. This is all too enormous to contemplate on my own, in the frazzled aftermath of my shattered slumber. My father is near death, and I’ll be returning to Bush Falls after seventeen years. I hoist the telephone to my ear and draw a complete blank. Who the hell do I think I’m calling?
    Determined to end my cycle of meaningless relationships, I’ve been experimenting with celibacy for the last six months, and, after a few false starts, I seem to have finally gotten the hang of it. This makes me two things: horny and pathetic. On any given day I might feel one or the other, but as I lie in the dark, nonplussed and alone in the vast, barren acreage of my king-sized bed, an optimistic purchase if there ever was one, it’s pathetic by a country mile.
    I try to think of a friend to call, and am appalled when I can’t come up with any that aren’t in some way linked to me professionally. After Bush Falls hit the best-seller list, I quit my job and moved from my one-bedroom walk-up on Amsterdam to a three-bedroom co-op on Central Park West, and the metamorphosis from an aspiring writer to a successful one seems to have somehow left me friendless. It’s all an indirect but no less acute manifestation of my fuck-you money.
    That’s what Owen calls it. The advance was one thing: seventy-five thousand, less his fifteen percent, of course, and then another thirty-eight percent or so to taxes. That left me with just under forty thousand dollars, which was certainly nothing to sneeze at, but hardly what could be classified as fuck-you money.
    “Oprah no longer picks books,” Owen told me one day shortly after the publication of Bush Falls as we sat in his office, brainstorming. “On the bright side, though, she never would have picked yours anyway. It has no long-suffering women, overachieving cripples, or epic journeys to a new spiritual consciousness.” This hardly came as a shock to me.
    Frankly, I was still reeling from the surprise that they’d published the book at all, let alone paid me a seventy-five-thousand-dollar advance. “So what are we going to do to sell this book?” Owen said with a frown.
    “Book tour?” I said.
    “You’re not a name.”
    “Advertising?”
    “Same problem.”
    “So how does one become a name?”
    “By selling many books.”
    “Okay. And how do we do that?”
    Owen frowned at me from behind his desk. “Oprah.”
    “Oh, come on,” I said. “People sold books before there was Oprah.”
    He nodded absently, lost in thought. “I have an idea,” he said.
    Owen arranged for Paperbacks Plus, Bush Falls’s local bookstore, to receive a large quantity of first editions at no charge. He then sent one of his clients, who also happened to be a staff writer for the New York Times, to Bush Falls to seek out some of the people portrayed in the book and interview them. The resulting article, “A Town Exposed,” combined with Owen’s incessant badgering, was enough to get someone at the Book Review to pay attention, and Bush Falls received a full-page write-up the following Sunday. The Times review was all Owen needed to launch his publicity machine.
    Within a month my little novel had been written up in People, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and a slew of other major magazines. Bush Falls made its first best-seller list about three months after it hit the bookshelves, and there was suddenly a dramatic increase in the number of digits in my royalty checks. When we found out we’d made the list, Owen actually jumped up onto his hand-carved Chinese cherrywood desk and danced a crazy little Owen jig. Then he flew off to Frankfurt and sold the European rights collectively for $250,000, and then went out to L.A., where he sold the film rights to Universal for five times that, and through it all the royalty checks continued to gain weight. Six months later, still on the list, I was sitting on more money