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  I pulled the phone out of its case and before I could even say hello, I heard Jenny scream on the other end, “Where have you been? I’ve been calling you every three minutes! Get back here now! They found your wallet! The guy at the dispatch garage is waiting for you!”

  I ran back to Jenny’s office, where she gave me a twenty and an address and shoved me into another cab.

  I found the garage, a grimy little cavern in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. Now, it wasn’t as if I expected Tony Danza and Danny DeVito to come out, greet me, and invite me to join them in a round of cards, but the last thing I expected was a shout coming from deep within the shadows of the cab cave directed unmistakably at me.

  “You the one? You the one with the wallet?” the disembodied Wizard-of-Oz-via-the-Bronx voice said.

  “Yeah,” I nodded, walking into the garage.

  “Are you stupid?” the voice, now clearly belonging to a man standing behind a counter, yelled at me. “Just how stupid are you? How could you be so stupid? Are you an idiot?”

  Do you know my mother? I wanted to ask him.

  “You gotta be an idiot to do what you done,” he said as he pulled my wallet out of a drawer and plopped it on the counter.

  “Listen,” I told him, “I already know that I’m an idiot, but I’m on my first book tour, this is my first stop, and I have the rest of the country to do. If I didn’t get this wallet and my ID back, I wasn’t going anywhere.”

  “Of course not,” he replied as he scoffed. “It’s an Orange Alert!”

  “Really?” I said, trying to smile. “But what I’m trying to say is that I cannot thank Mr. Sal—the very kind cabdriver enough for bringing this back. It’s more important than it seems.”

  “Well, it seems that the cabdriver lost out on a seventy-buck fare to JFK when he decided to turn around and bring this back,” the dispatcher said. “It seems that way.”

  “Well, I’d like to give him a copy of my book in appreciation,” I said with a big smile.

  “I’m sure he’ll love that,” the dispatcher said dryly. “That will almost make up for the seventy bucks plus tip that he lost to make sure you could go on your trip.”

  I nodded, smiled tightly, and pulled a wad out of my wallet.

  “Twenty, forty, sixty, seventy, seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven, seventy-eight, and I’m keeping this ten for cab fare back,” I said. “Is that enough appreciation?”

  “Seems that way,” he said. “But you can take your book.”

  “Thanks,” I said as I gathered up my stuff, including my book, and headed out.

  “Hey, Idiot Girl!” the dispatcher called out to me as I was almost to the sidewalk. “Hang on to that wallet, okay?”

  “Are you kidding?” I laughed back. “I’m on Red Alert.”

  4

  I am not a giant.

  I’m not tall, I’m not statuesque, I’m not lanky. I’m short and squat, like a molar. If I were a form of foliage, I would not be an alpine or redwood, I would be a rhododendron or kudzu. I’m a shrub. A succulent, perhaps. I’m a barrel in human form. I am quite nearly a midget among men.

  Still, when the seat in front of me suddenly lurched backward and almost into my lap as I was crammed into a teeny-tiny seat that only a newborn could find accommodating on my flight back from New York to Seattle, I was absolutely furious.

  I was at a loss for words during this instance, because in the first place, BECAUSE IN THE FIRST PLACE, how can reclining your seat back an inch and three-quarters make any kind of difference in comfort unless you are bleeding profusely from the head? How can it? It simply can’t, especially if you don’t have a footrest kick up at the same time or someone to plop a frosty one in your hand and a bowl of onion dip in your lap. An inch and three quarters, however, is enough of a dent in my space to make things more cramped than a marathon runner with a potassium deficiency. Because a one-and-three-quarters-inch bite all across the board was a significant percentage when I only had about six inches of personal airline space to begin with. And you know, if I can be frank, if I didn’t care about that inch and three quarters, I would have hit Cinnabon, Pretzel Mania, CPK, Paradise Bakery, and Margaritaville in a rampant, maniacal carbohydrate binge before I boarded.

  So see, I cared. I cared about that inch and three quarters, which if you multiply it by the 17.2-inch width of the standard seat, equals 21.35 inches, which in my book, is a BIG HUNGRY MAN-SIZED BITE out of my personal airline space. It’s as big as a baby!

  And this was all compounded by the fact that the woman in front of me, the woman who had decided to steal my space by choosing to recline, was the size of a circus peanut. You could cram her and twenty-three members of her family into a Crayola box. I know this because I saw her at check-in and remarked to myself that someone was playing with a Lord Farquad puppet/marionette and wondered where they got it because I wanted one, until I realized it was a real-life little lady. And now here she was, all annoying two feet of her, reclining very confidently into my lap while her feet weren’t even touching the floor. Personally, I think reclining needs to be outlawed, because what the passenger in front of me takes for himself he takes away from me. I have paid for that space. In retaliation, I believe seats should be fully equipped with a GUESS AGAIN, LA-Z-BOY!! button on the back side of every headrest to automatically shoot these space suckers back into the upright position. Or, at the very least, there has to be some sort of consent document signed by both parties involved in the recline in order for that action to take place. If no such agreement has been made, then the person being reclined upon has the complete and total right to make a citizen’s arrest or to exact some form of physical retribution.

  I mean, honestly, I wasn’t really all that much bigger than Miss Lord Farquad, but I needed that space, and I got so angry that I started searching frantically through my complimentary airline snack mix for a sharp corn chip or broken pretzel that I could throw at her. I figured if something like that could almost kill a president, I might have some chance of doing damage to my recliner. I finally found a rice snack the approximate shape of a spear head, and as I was about to shoot it toward her tiny pea skull, a burst of turbulence knocked it out of my hand and onto the ground. I had to uncross my legs to get it, a maneuver that should strictly be confined to an intermediate-to-advanced yoga class, but as a result, I discovered the recliner’s mortal enemy: The Kicker.

  Funny, it seems as though she liked having her kidneys beat on like they were a set of bongos at a Jimmy Cliff concert as much as I liked studying her female pattern baldness while her coconut head was in my lap.

  Next time, though, I’m saying “yes” to Cinnabon and getting seconds on the Mexican food, too, just in case I need backup.

  And I mean backup.

  5

  “That’s the way you’re going to sign your book?” my sister said, completely aghast one night at a family dinner right after the book had been released. I had just finished signing a copy for her friend, who I felt sure was going to try and sell it on eBay. “That’s just your name! You can’t do that! There’s no flash, no pizzazz! No one is going to wait in line for a dumb old signature like that! I had fancier signatures in my high school yearbook!”

  “Well, I guess I could add, ‘Stay sweet!’ or ‘2 Good 2 Be 4 Got 10’ or ‘Have a bitchin’ summer, dude,’ ” I said. “Or I could embellish my signature by dotting my i’s with clouds or hearts for full fancy potential.”

  “I’ve really given this some thought, and if I were you,” my father piped in, “I’d sign it, ‘Thanks for being a fan.’ I think people would appreciate that.”

  I smiled and I nodded, but honestly, it sounded a little weird to me. “Thanks for being a fan, Laurie.” It felt kind of, well, maybe patronizing, presumptuous, and even a bit snobby, to tell the truth. It didn’t sit well with me at all. Danielle Steel has fans, I reasoned, J. K. Rowling has fans, I concluded. But me? Fans? That’s just ridiculous and asinine, I told myself, not to mention la
ughable. I don’t have fans, I simply have more potential drinking partners, although on this tour I barely had time to take advantage of it.

  In fact, going on a book tour wasn’t what I had imagined going on a book tour would be. Essentially, it went like this: I would get off a plane, grab a taxi to the hotel with my hand on my wallet the whole trip, and have enough time to take a peek inside the minibar to decide between an eighteen-dollar jar of dry roasted peanuts and a four-dollar year-old Toblerone bar before my escort showed up to drive me to numerous “drop-ins.” “Drop-ins” are exactly that, dropping into a bookstore and signing whatever number of copies may be on hand, although sometimes the visit involved sales associates who appeared visibly very angry that I was delaying their break, or a glitch in the computer system that denied my claim as a writer and my book entirely, or a harried scream from an overprotective employee demanding to know why I was scribbling in her books and that I should stop immediately because she had just called security. Then, typically, I’d go back to the hotel room, wash my face while my poor escort was circling the block, get back into the car and go to a reading, sign some more books, and then go back to the hotel, where I’d pack and get ready to be at the airport in the morning.

  If this was a tour, I wondered, where were the buffets backstage? In fact, where was backstage? Backstage, in my case, essentially translated to “that corner behind Self-help and Gay Interest,” and believe me, the only food back there was stuff that Overeaters Anonymous members had dropped by mistake. I mean, I saw Almost Famous. I know what a tour is supposed to be like! And here I was on a tour and I never once got to proclaim myself a “Golden Goddess” and jump off a roof, I didn’t get to trade a groupie for a case of beer, and my escort never had the whimsy or bravado to bust through the gates of a Barnes & Noble, not even for my delight. The most exciting thing that happened was that I figured out how to order pay-per-view in my hotel room and I left some towels on the floor. What was I doing wrong? I thought to myself, and then it hit me. Sure, I was on tour, but I wasn’t the singer, guitarist, or even the bass player from Almost Famous. I was the little kid. The boring little writer. The boring, tired little writer, and sometimes cranky if the minibar didn’t offer me a wide enough balance of sugary and salty snacks.

  I found this out the hard way in Seattle when I was getting ready “backstage.” (I decided to adapt the restroom into my own personal lounge before my “show.” Well, not the whole thing, just one stall.) I had scarfed down my sixth Toblerone of the tour a couple of hours before for dinner and was suffering from heartburn. All of a sudden, while I was in my lounge, there was Ian Astbury, the lead singer of the Cult, singing “Fire Woman” to me and pelting me with gummy bears. Then, oddly enough, Ian Astbury, now a monkey, was trying to look up my dress and snap my girdle—I mean, body shaper. “Hey,” I yelled at the monkey, shaking my leg, “that is not cotton, the fabric of our lives, you know! You just gave me Spandex Burn!”

  That’s right, I had fallen asleep while sitting on the “chair” in my “lounge,” a wonderful little spot where all of my insecurities could gather in a dream and torment me. Frankly, I don’t know how long I was out, but when I finally got off the toilet and stumbled out to the reading, I had crease lines on my face from where my cheek got all bunched up like drapes from being pinned against the bathroom wall.

  Now, fortunately and unfortunately, sometimes people from your past find your reading at the local bookstore a very opportune time to reconnect in front of a bunch of strangers. This is great when it’s someone you have missed; it’s not so hot in front of twenty to thirty attendees when the guy who sat next to you in macroeconomics in 1991 puts you on the hot spot with the “What’s my name?” game, and is acting as if you did more one Thursday night than group-study for a midterm.

  For the most part, however, I was happy to reconnect with old, dear friends who have relocated to other parts of the country, as was the case when I walked with my wrinkled face to the podium in a Seattle bookstore. I looked down into the crowd and there was my dear, dear friend Parker, whom I hadn’t seen since he moved to the Pacific Northwest with my once-close friend Jack, who was conspicuously not there next to Parker.

  I knew why. Jack and I had started a magazine together almost a decade before. It got off to a good start, but after a year or so the publication was struggling and tempers were flaring. Our once happy staff—a group of tightly knit friends—was torn into two camps: the group that wanted to ride out the storm and see how far we could take the magazine we had built, failing if we had to; and the group that wanted to raise ad revenue by allowing some more-than-slightly-distasteful advertising and content in.

  One day Jack came into the office and, being the editor, fired everyone in the opposing camp. It was a devastating blow, the closest thing I had felt to a divorce, and I packed up my things and left. We had not spoken or seen each other since he gave me my walking papers. That was that. The magazine published two, maybe three more issues, and then, despite the unsavory ads, absolutely sank.

  After the reading, Parker came up to me with two books in his hand—one for himself, he said, and one for Jack.

  “I called him all day to get him to come,” Parker tried to explain. “But he said he’s at work on a deadline and couldn’t make it.”

  And then we both laughed.

  “He’s still in magazines?” I asked, to which Parker nodded. “Which one?”

  “Oh, it’s called Hot Cherry,” Parker said. “Porn.”

  I signed Parker’s book, told him how much I missed him, and then he handed me the one for Jack.

  I sat there for a moment, thinking, thinking, thinking. And then I knew.

  “Dear Jack,” I wrote on the title page, “Thanks for being a fan.”

  6

  I was trapped. Trapped at a crowded airport gate. People were sprawled, moaning, screaming, running, yelling, everywhere. From above, I’m sure the vision resembled a scene from a 1970s disaster movie.

  I couldn’t move without touching somebody, and I don’t like that. I had waited for three hours for the plane to arrive that would take me from Seattle to San Francisco, and frankly, if I had been wearing more comfortable shoes, I could have hoofed it and gotten there faster. At least it would have been more enjoyable than being crammed into a gate with my laptop, an elderly woman, and approximately two hundred members of the same Japanese high school basketball league.

  Teenagers. Hundreds and hundreds of them. They looked like locusts. Buzzing all around, creating havoc and mayhem. When the first group initially arrived at the gate, I found them cute and adorable. They all had matching shirts and luggage, they were all so cheerful and loaded with boundless energy. Some of the girls had pigtails. They giggled. They laughed. They played games.

  “Hoti hoti hoti, yoti yoti yoti, seen a seen a so,” some girls in a corner sang in Japanese—granted, my transliteration is rather rough. In time with their tune, they clapped their hands rhythmically along, playing some sort of game.

  I smiled, thinking back to my own high school trips, except that my hair wasn’t as shiny and bouncy as theirs, and we didn’t play clapping games, we just got drunk.

  “Seen a seen a so,” I sang in my head.

  Then another group from the same league arrived at the gate, and stuffed their luggage, duffel bags, and random, loose basketballs in among the empty chairs.

  Their chatter grew louder, more girls joined the clapping game behind me, but hey, I thought, they’re kids. Let them have their fun. They’re just having fun.

  “Hodi hodi hodi,” the girls sang, beating their quick little hands together.

  When the third group shuffled in, things started to get a little tight. And they got a little louder. And it started getting hot in that gate because the amount of energy that two hundred Japanese high school basketball players can generate was enough to put a silly old split atom to shame.

  A basketball zoomed by my head. They were playing catch. Someone stepped o
n my foot. The noise level boomed. There was nowhere to walk. It was getting very hot. It was hard to breathe.

  “HODI HODI HODI!!!” the girls screeched like chimpanzees behind me.

  My God, when is that plane going to get here? I thought as my fingers rubbed my sweaty, throbbing temple, but then I remembered that the plane getting here wasn’t going to solve anything, because they were all on it.

  THEY WERE ALL ON IT.

  “SEEN A SEEN A SO!!!!”

  Oh God, I moaned to myself, this is a nightmare! This is a complete nightmare! None of their coaches was doing anything to rein these basketball maniacs in because they had apparently been worn down to human nubs by these teenage monsters. I saw their chaperones, and what remained of them were just shells, ravaged to the bone. Some of them were actually sleeping during all of this from exhaustion. Either that or they had probably just died.

  I was trapped in an anime movie.

  It was horrible, especially when I had the realization that if my plane went down—I mean, it was an Orange Alert—the headlines wouldn’t cry YOUNG (SUBJECTIVELY SPEAKING) AUTHOR’S PROMISING LIFE SORROWFULLY CUT SHORT, but TEEN JAPANESE BASKETBALL LEAGUE DECIMATED IN HARROWING AIR TRAGEDY, and then maybe, if I was lucky, a subhead might read: BARELY WORTH MENTIONING CRANKY WRITER DIES, TOO, ALTHOUGH BASKETBALL TEAM DEATHS ARE OBVIOUSLY WAY SADDER.

  All I ever wanted was for my fiery death to be a full story, and now, all I was going to be was a sidebar.

  “HODI HODI HODI!!”

  Even now, I am amazed that I survived the ordeal, amazed that I did not run to the food court and try to stab myself to death with a plastic fork and take one or most of the clapping girls with me.

  When we finally landed in San Francisco, I met my escort, Grania, at the airport entrance. She was a wonderful, sweet woman who noticed my distress and gave me the last column of a Kit Kat bar she had left over from lunch. We did our drop-ins, went to the hotel, then headed out to San Jose for the reading that night. After spending two and a half hours on the freeway to go fifty miles, we finally arrived at the bookstore for that night’s reading.