The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written Read Online Free Page A

“He ran through the door and saw …”
    And he got no further than one sentence in his attempt at a murder mystery: “Stephen Butler did it.”
    After several months, Johnny had several hundred novel starts and no finishes when he decided to write a modern memoir, not knowing, or evidently caring, that thirty-year-old, unpublished pizza delivery drivers didn’t write memoirs anyone would ever read. He had tried a literary approach first:
    He was born.
    He knew that.
    He knew he had been born.
    This was vital knowledge.
    It was a fact of life, this birth, he thought. One had to be born, eh? Good old birth. My reason for being here.
    He didn’t know where he was born or to whom, however, and that made him angry.
    The phrase “made him angry” changed to “pained him to no end” and then to “reminded him how insignificant he was when compared to the whole freaking universe, which was freaking huge and went in all directions” before finalizing into “made him really angry.”
    His life sucked so bad that his tongue lodged in his esophagus, flies flocked to him in droves, and his toilets, sinks, and tub never became clogged because the entire world sucked all around him.
    He knew he had been born in America, and that was enough.
    He was an American.
    That, too, was enough.
    He had been adopted by a well-meaning Virginia couple on a well-meaning farm in a time without meaning …
    Before Johnny was adopted, he wished he had rich parents who were traveling the globe until he turned eighteen, and they would return with great pomp and circumstance to give him a multimillion-dollar trust fund, a Ferrari, a summer home in the Rockies, and a lifetime supply of Captain Crunch.
    That hadn’t happened.
    At eighteen, Johnny’s only excitement was registering for the draft and going to Virginia Tech to study engineering.
    Before he was adopted, whenever a classmate had asked “Where’s your daddy?” or “Where’s your mama?” Johnny usually lied. Depending on his audience, he said his parents had “died in the war” or were currently “astronauts on a space station.” In first grade, he told anyone who would listen that he was really a test-tube baby.
    No one, of course, had believed him, and when the Holidays adopted him when he was six, Johnny changed overnight from Jonathan Rutherford Orr to Johnny “No Middle Name” Holiday.
    And none of this made good “literary nonfiction,” as some referred to memoirs, so he changed his memoir to first person:
    I was born.
    I know that.
    I know I have been born.
    Who doesn’t know that?
    I mean, I wasn’t born yesterday, right?
    It is a fact of life, birth. One has to be born, eh? Good old birth. My reason for being here.
    I don’t know where I was born or to whom, however, and that sucks big rocks, little rocks, and every rock in between, even the tiny little rocks that masquerade as sand.
    Though he thought this new version was much more powerful and direct in the present tense, and though it had an in-your-face Hemingway-as-sloppy-drunk feel to it, he decided that this, too, was garbage, and by extension, that his life was garbage.
    The mice in his apartment had not disagreed.
    These thoughts of garbage led him to contemplate life, which led Johnny to thoughts of It’s a Wonderful Life, the Christmas holiday classic playing since late October on seemingly every freaking channel on the television. Johnny had wondered why Hollywood hadn’t rewritten and ruined this movie classic with a remake of some kind. After reading the screenplay for Rambo III and deciding that screenplays were pitifully easy to write, he wrote a simple, heartfelt treatment for It’s a Wonderful Death :
    Here we are in 2004. GEORGE BAILEY and his friends are riding stolen skateboards through a strip mall in Bedford Falls, New York. GEORGE does a fancy move on the railing down some concrete stairs. Oh, he’s landed on his privates. His friends, of course, are filming it to embarrass him later