HEY, HEY, YESTERDAY -- PART TWO
Author’s note: This is the second installment of a novel-in-progress. You’ll find the first seven chapters on my August 12th post. This is the first draft of a novel, so it isn’t as clean and fleshed out as a finished novel. Feel free to offer suggestions in the comments below. I have plenty of time to alter every aspect of this piece, so all reasonable suggestions will be considered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Artistic families usually have at least one black sheep, someone who can’t paint or write or play a musical instrument with any sort of proficiency. And often this black sheep channels her artistic energies into some sort of occult-like enterprise – tarot cards, aromatherapy, séances, transcendental meditation. These familial outliers tend to refer to TM or tarot or palm reading or whatever as “my art,” as if to elevate it to a status equal to being a concert pianist or an opera singer. One of my band mates was an older guy named Griffin Tammershak. For years he had been a member of Mac Davis’s band, and he traveled almost nonstop with Davis throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, playing mandolin, guitar, pedal-steel guitar, and even a little banjo. Griffin came from a very artistic family. His father was a concertmaster for the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera Company. His mother was an actress and a singer. One of his older brothers was a director of documentary films and the other was a concert violinist. Griffin’s parents had always wanted to have a daughter but the pregnancy stork seemed to have lost their address after delivering the youngest of their three sons. Then, twenty years after Griffin’s birth, Mrs. Tammershak, now in her late forties, found herself once again pregnant. And nine months later, Griffin’s much younger baby sister, Juliet, was born. Alas, Juliet was too coddled as a child to do anything difficult like take piano lessons or learn how to paint. Her parents were so happy to at last find themselves blest with a daughter that they essentially allowed the child to do whatever she wanted. She grew up kind of wild and hippie-like but a good twenty years after the heyday of the American hippie. Somewhere along her journey through life Juliet became convinced that she possessed what she called “psi powers,” a catchall phrase for telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and various other quack specialties. The good thing about psi powers, as opposed to artistic ability, is that they can’t ever be definitively disproved. Put a guitar in the hands of someone who claims to be a great guitarist and you’ll find out soon enough whether he can play or not. But ask a quack spiritualist to demonstrate their ability to foretell the future or bend spoons with their mind or communicate with the dead, and they can always beg off by simply claiming that the circumstances aren’t favorable, or that these gifts can’t be forced to perform on command, or some other such nonsense. Fortunately for Juliet, her parents had set up a modest trust fund for her in their will. And after they died, she was able to indulge her passion for the otherworldly without having to worry overmuch about earning a living. Thus, she was now in her forties and still dressed like Stevie Nicks, circa 1976, with scarves where most women would wear bracelets, chunky necklaces where the scarves should have been, and headbands that made her look like a cross between a gypsy fortune teller and a pretendian. I knew all this only from stories that Griffin had told me about his sister. Until Chloe became famous, I had never actually met Juliet in the flesh. But Griffin happened to be talking to Juliet on the phone one day when she mentioned that she wished her psi powers were as strong as those belonging to “that girl on TV who is able to predict political scandals just by reading old books.” Griffin told Juliet that he knew that girl. “No you don’t,” Juliet snapped. “I do,” Griffin told her. “Her husband and I play together in a bluegrass band. I see her every Wednesday at the Fox & Goose Pub here in Sac.” Before Griffin could talk her out of it, Juliet had arranged to fly to Sacramento and spend a few days with her big brother. She wanted him to introduce her to Chloe. Griffin called me on the phone and warned me that Juliet would be at our next Wednesday night gig. He suggested I tell Chloe to stay home Wednesday night. Otherwise she was likely to be pestered mercilessly by Juliet and her psi powers.
But Griffin needn’t have worried. As you might expect of a pop fiction junkie, Chloe isn’t at all put off by wacky people. In fact, she kind of cultivates them. She used to work part time at a Sacramento antiquarian bookshop, where she made the acquaintance of all sorts of UFO freaks, psychics, conspiracy theorists, political fanatics, and various other nut-balls. She loved talking to these people. They viewed life as if it were some wild-ass work of pulp fiction, full of space aliens and cabals of witches and communist plots and secret messages being beamed out of our television sets and causing us to become consumerist zombies under the mesmeric control of our Madison Avenue overlords who were in cahoots with the CIA, the FBI, and, improbably, the ACLU. Chloe loved pulp fiction, and anyone who struck her as a character from a cheap novel would generally receive a warm welcome from her. I think she first fell for me because, as a bluegrass musician living nearly rent-free in his grandparents’ hundred-year-old home, I seemed like the kind of guy the heroine of gothic romance – or a gothic horror – novel would probably fall for. The fact that I spent my days filling orders for ghost customers (our in-house slang for e-shoppers, because we rarely laid eyes on any of them) probably lent me an additional aura of mystery. After I told Chloe about Juliet, she couldn’t wait to make her acquaintance.
On Wednesday, Chloe and I showed up at the Fox & Goose at six o’clock, our usual time. Chloe and I always have dinner – usually fish and chips – at the Goose before I begin my first set with the band. Griffin arrived, as usual, at about six thirty and began setting up our equipment. He introduced Juliet to Chloe and me. She sat down at our table to chat with Chloe. I had no chance to converse with Juliet because I had to run out to my car, grab my banjo, and then help the others with setting up for the show. But, from what I could see, Juliet and Chloe seemed to hit it off well, even though Juliet was at least fifteen years older than Chloe and much more flamboyant in her personal style. She was dressed all in black, wore heavy-soled black work boots, and the ends of her short grayish hair were died the exact same purple as the tinted lenses in the wire-framed granny glasses she wore even though it was nighttime, we were in dimly lighted bar, and there was absolutely no need for shaded eyeglasses. Zac Vargas had notified me that he would be arriving late. So, instead of being our opening act, he planned to do his set during our first rest break.
Our first set began promptly at seven and we began to roll through our renditions of various bluegrass standards such as Shady Grove and Little Liza Jane and Alabama Jubilee. As the night progressed, so would our music. We liked to start out with traditional tunes and then gradually move through the decades with folk numbers and country songs that became famous in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Normally, Chloe was pretty attentive to what was happening up on the stage (really just a six-inch riser near the back of the bar), but tonight she was paying almost no attention to the music. She and Juliet were engaged in a discussion so intense that their foreheads were practically touching. For some reason, seeing the two of them together like that, I was reminded of Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman in the film Practical Magic, a pair of sisterly witches. We ended our first set at seven forty-five, and I went back to the table and took a seat alongside Chloe. Zac Vargas went up on stage to play a few of his folksongs while the members of Brewgrass and I took a break. Usually, Zac’s set was Chloe’s favorite part of the night. Brewgrass played nothing but standards, but Zac played his own material, and Chloe was always eager to find out if he had added any new songs to his repertoire. Tonight, however, she told me that she and Juliet were going to hail a Rydeshare car and go back to our house. “Juliet’s going to hypnotize me,” Chloe said excitedly. “She thinks that might tell us how I’ve managed to dig up so much political dirt in the pages of old novels.”
“Great,” I said unenthusiastically. “It’ll be just like A Stir of Echoes.”
“Don’t worry,” said Juliet, “we promise not to dig up the bodies of any dead homewreckers who might be buried under your house.” Apparently she was as much of a pop-culture vulture as my wife. Both women giggled and gathered their purses.
I made a last-ditch effort to prevent Chloe from leaving. “What about your boyfriend, Zac Vargas?” I teased her. “Don’t you wanna hang around and see if has any new folk songs for you?”
She laughed. “If he debuts a new song, be sure to remember the title so I can request it next week.”
Just as she and Juliet stepped outside into the night, Zac began his first song. “I thought I could master love,” he sang, “but love is always the master. I thought I could outrun fear, but fear is always faster.”
I had never heard it before.
CHAPTER NINE
I didn’t get home until eleven that night. By then, Juliet appeared to be long gone and I could hear Chloe tapping away at the keyboard in her home office. I had to be at work at six a.m. so I put away my banjo and went to bed.
When I awoke the next morning, I sat down at the table with a bowl of cereal and opened up my laptop. As I suspected, Chloe had posted a new essay to Pop Fiction Matters earlier that morning. Considering our last words at the pub the night before, I figured she might have written an essay about pop fictions in which hypnotism plays a role. Just a week or two earlier she had been singing the praises of a novel called The Fifth Sally, written by Daniel Keyes, better known as the author of Flowers for Algernon. She said it was about a psychiatrist who uses hypnotism in order to treat a schizophrenic woman whose mind had split into five separate entities. But her new essay didn’t mention The Fifth Sally. Neither did it mention A Stir of Echoes, or any other pop fiction in which hypnotism plays a role. Instead the subject was…masturbation. Well, sort of.
The real subject was Derek Pritchard, who was the president of the ten-campus University of California system. He had spent six years as a Congressman from the Santa Barbara area. He had also served as the Secretary of Education under a previous Democratic presidential administration. Curiously, he was not a candidate for president. But a handful of the media’s “very serious people,” mostly liberal columnists for the New York Times, the Washington Post and other left-leaning publications, had been urging him to enter the race. These pundits usually noted just how satisfying it would be to watch a presidential debate between Pritchard, an articulate Harvard-educated scholar, and Grant Fuller, a billionaire cattle rancher with no college degree and a penchant for making up “facts” on the fly. Like former New York Governor Mario Cuomo back in 1992, Pritchard seemed to think that he should be spared the messy job of campaigning for the nomination and that the Democratic Party should simply turn to him en masse and beg him to take on the Republican incumbent. As you may recall, while Cuomo waited to be anointed – and waited and waited and waited – a far less ideal candidate named William Jefferson Clinton actually campaigned for the nomination, won it, and then went on to serve two terms in the White House. In recent months, Pritchard had been asked several times on TV news shows if he might be considering a run for the White House. The fact that he had refused to rule out the possibility had given his champions in the press some hope that he might finally roll up his sleeves, get out on the campaign trail, and start kissing babies (not to mention the asses of deep-pocketed donors). And, truth be told, the recent departures of both Governor Cook and Senator Ramsfield from the race, coupled with various stumbles by some of the other Democratic hopefuls actually appeared to have pushed Pritchard closer to declaring his candidacy. Last night, apparently, he had appeared on Late-Breaking and told host Lexie Burton that he would make a decision in the next two weeks. Chloe provided a link to the interview in her blog post, which I watched a part of. After asking about his stance on various issues – the war in Ukraine, abortion, same-sex marriage, etc. – Burton asked him to name a favorite novel. Pritchard, a scholar and an avid reader, had obviously been ready for this question. He said that one of the books that made him choose a career in academia was Robert Cormier’s 1974 young-adult novel The Chocolate War. “It’s a story about what happens to a school – or to any institution, a church, a corporation, a government – when a bully is allowed to have his way with it. In The Chocolate War, only one student stands up to the bully. Everyone else in the school – the students, the teachers, the administrators – all let the bully have his way, either because they are scared, because they are just as immoral as the bully himself, or because they think they can influence the bully’s behavior in ways that will benefit them. But if we don’t stand up to bullies, they just get more powerful and more destructive and then they destroy the institution that gave rise to them.”
BURTON: Are you saying that President Grant Fuller is a bully who must be stopped?
PRITCHARD: I’m not pointing the finger at any one person, Lexie. Sadly, life is full of bullies. But the way to defeat them isn’t by cowering in fear or hoping that they will just go away. The way to defeat them is to confront them. Scratch the paint off a bully and, nine times out of ten, you’ll find a coward underneath. Bullies usually win not because they are all-powerful but because they have a gift for appearing to be all-powerful. That’s the lesson that The Chocolate War teaches us. President Putin is nothing more than a bully with a nuclear arsenal. I believe that if we stand up to bullies like Putin, we can bring them down.
BURTON: Sounds like a stump speech.
PRITCHARD: Call it what you want. But read the book. It may have a profound effect on your life. I know it did on mine. I read it when I was a teenager and I’ve read it every few years since then. It has a message that never grows old.
BURTON: If you want to attack bullies from the most powerful office in the world, you’re always welcome to announce that you’re a candidate for president right here on Late-Breaking.
PRITCHARD: I’ll keep that in mind.
In her essay, titled “The Choke-It War,” Chloe pointed out that masturbation is an obsession with many of the teenage boys in The Chocolate War. In fact, the chief bully, a student named Archie, is able to manipulate a lesser bully named Emile into all kinds of sketchy activities because, some time earlier, Archie kicked open the door of a bathroom stall and took a Polaroid of Emile masturbating. Ever since then, out of fear that Archie will show the photo to others, Emile has done whatever Archie has asked him to do. Chloe then suggested that Derek Pritchard’s refusal to enter the presidential race might have something to do “with an old Polaroid owned by one of his erstwhile prep school classmates.” After all, she pointed out, plenty of high-ranking Republicans were classmates of Pritchard’s both at Groton and, later, at Harvard. “If Derek is Emile, then who might be his Archie?” Pritchard’s family owned a large bookstore near the University of Santa Barbara. Pritchard practically grew up in the bookstore. Many of the photos of Derek that appeared on the social media feeds of his friends and family members had bookstore shelves as backdrops. Chloe was able to find a photo in which Pritchard appeared before a bookshelf that held both Portnoy’s Complaint and Ulysses, two books in which masturbation is featured prominently. She also found a photograph of a young Derek Pritchard holding William Kotzwinkle’s 1980 novel Jack in the Box. It was the only book about beating off that she could find actually in Pritchard’s hand, although whether he was taking it off the shelf to read or simply shelving a random book at his parents’ store couldn’t be determined. Chloe quoted generously from Kotzwinkle’s comic novel, which tells the story of Jack Twiller, a young American boy coming of age in the 1940s and 50s. Chapter thirteen of the novel was titled “Did Captain Marvel Jack Off?” Chloe gleefully cited a scene in which several of the characters engage in a “jack off contest.” It was funny in a juvenile sort of way. Chloe got lucky and found an online copy of Pritchard’s prep school yearbook photo. Beneath his name were the initials of a variety of clubs to which Pritchard belonged in his school days. One acronym was JOC. Chloe pondered whether it stood for Jack Off Club. (In fact, it turned out to be the initials of the Junior Orators Club). Chloe’s essay was her most unfair yet, but it was written with such a silly tone that no one could seriously accuse her of trying to ruin Pritchard’s presidential hopes, if, indeed, he had any. In fact, the main thrust of the essay was masturbation in popular fiction. Apparently, it is a fairly common phenomenon in popular novels – nearly as common as hypnosis. Chloe’s essay included a link to a listicle that provided the titles of 150 works of pop fiction in which masturbation plays a prominent role, including titles by Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Judy Blume, to name but a few.
To my surprise, a very weary-looking Chloe came scuffling into the kitchen, poured herself some coffee, and sat down at the table with me. Whenever I saw her like that I was reminded of the title of my favorite Tom Robbins novel, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, although her pajamas featured rabbits rather than amphibians.
“What are you doing up so early?” I asked.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Thought I’d get up and try to write something for Lady Audley, even though we don’t need the money any more. No use burning a paying market.”
“What happened last night with Juliet?” I asked. “Did she hypnotize you?”
“She gave it the old college try, but I don’t think it worked.”
“You don’t think it worked?”
“Well, I didn’t put my shoe in the refrigerator like Tom Wallace.”
Because she frequently insists that I read the work of some of her favorite pop fictioneers, I knew that this was a reference to the protagonist of Richard Matheson’s 1958 novel A Stir of Echoes. In the 1999 film he was played by Kevin Bacon and his last name was changed to Witzky.
“So what was she like? Kooky? Spooky? Altogether ooky? Do tell.”
“She was…kinda sad. She’s really into all that woo-woo New Age nonsense. She talked about psi powers so much – psi powers this, psi powers that – it almost felt as though she were talking about her dentist or her tax accountant, some guy named Cy Powers. She brought a bunch of ESP paraphernalia in that massive purse of hers.”
“Such as?”
“Such as a deck of Zener cards.”
“Zener cards?”
“It’s a deck of twenty-five cards, invented back in the 1930s by a parapsychologist named Karl Zener. It’s used to determine how much psychic ability a test subject possesses. Zener cards are mentioned in Ramona Stewart’s The Nightmare Candidate, so Juliet assumed I was familiar with them. The deck includes five cards with nothing but a circle on them, five with a square, five with a cross, five with a star, and five with a set of wavy lines. She sat beside me on the sofa and then she would hold up a card so that she could see the symbol on it but I couldn’t. Then she asked me to try to determine what card she was holding by reading her mind.”
“And did it work? Were you able to read her mind?”
“Not really. I got twelve out of twenty-five correct. It felt like a failure to me. But she told me that eighty percent of test subjects get only between three and seven correct. That’s what you’d expect if the subjects were just guessing. Only about ten percent of test subjects get eight or more correct. Only about one test subject in ninety thousand gets fifteen correct. So my twelve correct answers placed me in the top one or two percent.”
“So it sounds as if you aced it!”
She shook her weary head. “That’s what Juliet said. But, honestly, I was just guessing. I couldn’t read her mind at all. I suggested we try it a second time, but she said no. Further testing tends to lower the result because the test subject begins trying too hard to improve her score and second-guesses herself. But I felt pretty certain that if I’d taken the test again I’d have gotten a lower score.”
“What else did she do to you?”
“Well, the first Zener test was to determine my mind-reading ability. She also used the Zener deck to test my precognitive abilities.”
“Like the precogs in Minority Report?”
“Exactly. This time she asked me to name a card – circle, square, cross, waves, or star. After I named a card, she’d shuffle the deck and then draw the top card. If I got it right, then supposedly I must have predicted the future, because the card hadn’t even been at the top of the deck yet when I made my guess. If that makes any sense.”
“So how did you do on that test?”
“I got eight correct, which, according to Juliet, means that I have some precognitive abilities but they aren’t as strong as my ability to read minds. If you ask me, the whole thing was nonsense, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by saying so.”
“What about the hypnotism?”
“Well, it wasn’t like the hypnotism you see in movies or anything. She had me close my eyes and then she told me to imagine walking through a sort of mythical wilderness. She described it for me. I passed babbling brooks and fairy tale houses and spiraling mountains that disappeared into the clouds. It was all very Brothers Grimmy. But she didn’t make any effort to delve into my psyche or give me any post-hypnotic suggestions. At least not that I can recall. I think she was trying to get me to fall into a hypnotic state, but it just never happened. Some people can’t be hypnotized.”
“Are you sure about that? Because you seem kinda spaced out right now.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
I laughed. “There’s the Chloe I know and love. How long did Juliet stay?”
“Only till about ten o’clock. She’s going to be staying with Griffin for a week or two, so we may get together again. We didn’t make any definite plans. After she left, I went to my office and cranked out my essay about Derek Pritchard.”
There was something about her story that puzzled me but I was too distracted just then to put my finger on it. I had to get to work. So I kissed the top of her head and went to the freezer to grab one of the frozen microwavable burritos that I often have for my lunch on workdays. When I opened the freezer door I saw one of Chloe’s lime green Converse All-Star hightops sitting on a shelf next to the ice tray. I grabbed the shoe and held it out for Chloe to see.
“Is this some kind of a joke?” I asked.
She looked at me, nonplussed. “What are you talking about?”
“This shoe. It was in the freezer. Feel it. It’s obviously been in there all night long. It’s frozen stiff.”
Chloe just stared at me, looking confused. After a while, she said, “You didn’t put it in there as a joke when you got home last night?”
“No,” I said. “I went straight to bed.”
“Well…maybe Juliet did hypnotize me. Or maybe…”
“Maybe what?” I asked.
“Well, I slipped off my shoes as soon as we got home. And at one point, Juliet asked me if she could use our bathroom. Maybe she grabbed one of my sneakers when I wasn’t looking. Then, when she walked to the back of the house to use the bathroom, maybe she slipped in here to the kitchen and stuck my shoe in the freezer.”
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know. Why do kooky people do anything? Maybe she wanted to earn my trust. Maybe she was hoping that when I woke up and found my shoe in the freezer, I’d believe in her hypnotic powers. And that would make me more susceptible the next time she tried to hypnotize me.”
“Is there going to be a next time?”
“I dunno,” Chloe said. “Juliet seems really interested in my psi powers. It wouldn’t surprise me if she wanted to take another whack at hypnotizing me at some point.”
“Well, next time make sure that I’m around when she does it. I don’t want her putting any weird hypnotic suggestions into your brain. There’s enough weirdness in there already.”
“Better leave for work,” Chloe snarked. “You’re gonna be late.”
I grabbed my burrito and hurried out to the car. Duty called, and my ghost shoppers awaited. When I was outside on the driveway, I peered through the kitchen window for one last look at Chloe before getting into the car. She was sitting at the table, her chin resting on her right hand and the frozen sneaker in her left hand, a perplexed look on her face. Perhaps she was trying to recall what other oddball suggestions Juliet might have planted in her brain last night. Or maybe the look on her face was just exhaustion. She had stayed up half the night writing and had woken up earlier than usual. And now, here she was at the kitchen table, wondering about the frozen shoe in her hand, half asleep in rabbit pajamas.
CHAPTER TEN
The people I shop for at Taylor’s are never identified by name on the handheld device we e-cart fillers get our orders from. The device displays an order number and then a list of the items the ghost shopper wants us to gather for them. The online software allows the shopper to add written instructions to the e-cart filler. For instance, a shopper might request bananas “but only if they are ripe and ready to eat. I don’t want any green on the banana peel.” Or the shopper might order a half-gallon of Crystal Creamery Whole Milk and then add, in the comments, “make sure the ‘sell by’ date is at least twelve days out.” After we gather all of the groceries and box them up, we wheel the order to a storage area at the back of the store where, eventually, a delivery driver will pick it up and take it to the customer’s home. Some customers prefer to pick up their orders outside the store. We have a parking area reserved for those shoppers. All they have to do is park their cars and then send a text to our delivery department. Within minutes (usually) someone will wheel a cart out to the parking lot and load the groceries into the customer’s car.
Although we e-cart fillers don’t know the actual names of any of our ghost shoppers, we have a few dozen regular shoppers whose orders are so unique that we can instantly recognize them just by glancing quickly at the list on our computer screens. Most of these ghosts have been given nicknames by the e-cart crew. We have Grenade Man who, whenever they are in season, orders four avocadoes each time he shops online and always insists in the comments that he wants them “as hard as grenades.” Apparently he likes to let them ripen in his kitchen. Another regular is the Toothpick Man, who always orders a box of wooden toothpicks with each weekly order. We e-cart fillers have decided that he either entertains frequently and makes a lot of canapés or else he has really, really clean teeth. Perhaps both. And then, of course, there is the shopper we call Nora Whitman. Nora Roberts (a pseudonym for Eleanor Robertson) is a writer of romance novels and generally churns out between six and twelve new titles per year. She also writes “romantic suspense” novels under the pseudonym J.D. Robb. “Nora Whitman” expects us to keep track of both pseudonyms and always requests we provide her with “whatever book comes after Forgotten in Death,” or whatever the most recently published of the Roberts/Robb books was called. Of course, entire weeks sometimes pass without a new Roberts/Robb book hitting our shelves, but we always have to check. Even without the Roberts/Robb requests, however, we would have no trouble identifying Nora Whitman, because every weekly order includes a demand for a 72-piece Whitman’s Sampler box of assorted chocolates. One time, early in my tenure at Taylor’s, I scanned the correct box of assorted chocolates but got interrupted by an in-store customer before I could put it into my basket. When I returned to my task, I accidentally grabbed hold of a box containing nothing but nougat-filled candies. Nora Whitman was not pleased. She sent a letter to the store requesting that we take greater care when filling her order for Whitman’s chocolates. Her three page letter pointed out that, if we are in any doubt about the contents of a Whitman’s candy box, all we have to do is open it and take a look inside. “The square shaped chocolates have caramel in them. The rectangles have nougat in them. The ovals have fudge. The round chocolates have cherry cordial. And the nut clusters can easily be identified by anyone who has ever seen a nut in his life.” My boss relayed this information to me but didn’t allow me to read the original letter. Many ghost shoppers prefer to maintain their anonymity. For all we e-cart fillers know, the Grenade Man might be a little old lady, the Toothpick Man might be a computer program placing automatic refill orders for a local restaurant, and Nora Whitman might be a longshoreman. But making guesses about the lives and personalities of the people we are shopping for is a regular part of an e-cart fillers daily grind.
On the Thursday in question, I put in an eight-hour shift at work and didn’t think much more about “The Choke-It War,” but when I got home I learned that it, too, had gone viral. Apparently a few old Groton boys from Pritchard’s class has made some jokes online about what a world-class masturbator he had been back in the day. Whether these were references to actual behavior on Pritchard’s part or just mean-spirited jokes, I couldn’t tell. But, sure enough, the blogosphere soon became full of posts with headlines like, “Is He For Real This Time or Just Jerking Us Off?” and “Is Derek Pritchard Tossing His Hat in the Ring or Just Tossing Off?” All of these posts were linked to “The Choke-It War.” Chloe’s blog was no doubt gaining dozens of new readers and (hopefully) subscribers with each passing minute.
At dinner that night, it finally occurred to me what it was that had puzzled me that morning.
“So,” I said to Chloe, “Juliet left at about ten last night?”
“Yeah. Ten. Ten thirty.”
“And you went straight to work on your ‘Choke-It War’ essay after that?”
“Pretty much.”
“But at ten thirty, Derek Pritchard’s interview on Late-Breaking hadn’t even aired yet out on the west coast. How could you have known when you started your essay that he would cite The Chocolate War as his favorite novel?”
“Hmmm…Good question.” She pondered this for a moment. “I don’t know. The interview was conducted live three hours earlier back in New York. By the time I started my essay, the contents of the interview were probably already available online. I must have stumbled across it when I was researching my essay about masturbation in popular fiction. I don’t really remember. You know how I go into a sort of trance when I do my writing. And afterwards I can rarely remember all the details of how I put the essay together. Maybe I just stumbled across the info about Pritchard and The Chocolate War while I was in one of my writing trances, scouring the internet for information about masturbation and popular fiction.”
“Or maybe your precog skills are a lot better than you think they are.”
She laughed, so I joined in. But I hadn’t been joking.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
For several days running, jokes about Pritchard and masturbation were a fixture of late-night talk show monologues and rightwing political pundits. And over the next week or so, Pritchard, who hadn’t been involved in the rough-and-tumble world of a political campaign for nearly twenty years, seemed to lose his enthusiasm for a presidential bid. Whether it was “The Choke-It War” that discouraged him from running, I can’t say. But eight days after Chloe’s essay appeared, Pritchard let it be known that he would not be entering the presidential race.
After Pritchard’s announcement, political junkies began filling up the comments section of Chloe’s Pop Fiction Matters blog. “Who are you going to take down next?” they wanted to know. But Chloe was a great believer in the storytelling motto of Wilkie Collins: “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait.” For the next few weeks she wrote about nothing but popular fiction. Her subscriber numbers didn’t increase much during these weeks but neither did they fall. This struck me as unfair. Her political essays tended to be puerile and not entirely fair-spirited. Her pop fiction essays, on the other hand, tended to be fascinating. She was always coming up with ideas that I had never seen written about before. She wrote an entire essay about famous novels whose titles are also the final words of the book. You probably can’t think of any off hand, but Chloe examined a few dozen of these. I thought it was an excellent essay, but it didn’t generate a single new subscription to the blog. I suppose I shouldn’t complain, however, because by this time she had close to ten thousand paid subscribers and was bringing in around twenty thousand dollars a month.
I wrote a letter to my grandparents in Spain. They had been out of the country for so long that they no longer paid much attention to American politics. What’s more, they were leading a very off-line life. They preferred “IRL” activities – museums, restaurants, train rides through the Spanish countryside – to the virtual thrills of the internet. I doubt they even knew what IRL meant. Thus, they were completely unaware of Chloe’s newfound status as a low-grade internet celebrity. I explained it all to them in my letter and told them that, thanks to Chloe’s paid subscribers, we now had enough money to purchase the house from them if they were willing to sell it to us. Though the house was relatively small and slightly run down, it was located at the outer edge of a of Sacramento neighborhood (known as Land Park) that was highly desirable. I found some comparable houses that were for sale and grabbed hold of their sales brochures. I gave my grandparents a very generous estimate of what the house was work. Then I told them that, given Chloe’s sudden rise in income, we should have enough money within a few months to make a twenty percent down payment on the house. We should also have a healthy enough monthly income by then to secure a bank loan for the remainder of the purchase price. I asked that, if this was agreeable to them, they would let me know and I would begin arranging for the sale to take place. I didn’t mention any of this to Chloe because I didn’t want her to feel any pressure to keep her subscriber list growing. Besides, if she truly was a precog, she had probably seen this idea developing before I did.
Everything was going smoothly for Chloe and me. Money was pouring in. And then one day, a strange old woman approached me as I was filling up an e-cart for a customer at work. She pulled a folded piece of paper from her purse and stuffed it into the pocket of the smock that all employees of Taylor’s market are required to wear at work. “This is for your wife,” she said. “It’s information about that damn Williams woman.” And then, as quickly as she had appeared in aisle nine, she turned and hurried out of it. At first I had no idea what ‘Williams woman’ she was referring to. I pulled the crumpled paper from my pocket and unfolded it. A handwritten scrawl covered nearly every square inch of both sides of the paper. I had no time to try to decipher it, but it looked like the kind of thing TV serial killers leave lying around their squalid lodgings. But I could see that the name Breneé Williams was written at the top of the sheet, and was underlined, heavily, three times. Breneé Williams was a television “life coach” who had decided, god knows why, to run for president on a third-party ticket. No one gave her a chance in a million of winning the White House, but she was expected to capture somewhere around two to four percent of the vote, and in a tight race she could well play the role of spoiler. At this point no one was quite sure whether her presence in the race would benefit the Democrats or the Republicans. Some argued that, being a woman and a supporter of abortion rights and gay marriage, she was likely to draw votes away from the eventual Democratic nominee. Others noted that her message – lift yourself up by your own bootstraps and quit sitting around the house waiting for the government or some man to solve your problems for you – played better with conservative women than it did with liberal ones. (No political pundits expected Ms. Williams to draw any male votes at all; her media empire was almost entirely a female phenomenon.) At any rate, she was fabulously wealthy, planned to spend heavily on her vanity campaign, and had introduced an element of uncertainty into the race that was making strategists for both of the major parties uneasy. I was not comfortable with Chloe’s newfound role as a Destroyer of Democrats, but I would have been perfectly happy to see her damage Breneé Williams’s White House hopes. Williams struck me as a totally unserious candidate whose ego and money could possibly do lasting damage to the country if she were allowed to tip the electoral scales in some unexpected way come November. But I highly doubted that a few hundred words committed to paper in a serial-killer scrawl could take down a billionaire with a full-time public relations staff and a vast media empire. I decided not to throw away the old lady’s screed. But neither would I just past pass it along to Chloe without first reading its contents and making sure that it wasn’t something that might get her in trouble if she published it. But that would have to wait until I got home.
In the meantime, here are some of the famous novels, mentioned in Chloe’s essay, whose titles also serve as their final words:
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Chloe’s essay also discussed novels whose titles appeared in their final sentences but were not the final words. Consider, for example, John Irving’s The World According to Garp, whose final sentence reads, “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.” The words One Hundred Years of Solitude appear in the final sentence of that Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel but they are not the final words of the book. And then there are books, such as Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, whose titles appear, somewhat altered, in their final lines (“The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” And finally there is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, whose title is scrambled inside the Latin phrase that concludes the novel: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus, which is usually translated as, “All that remains of the ancient rose is its name, mere names being all that we can hold onto.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
As usual, I got home from work at around three fifteen in the afternoon. Chloe was on the sofa, notebook in her lap, hastily scribbling down ideas for an essay she was planning to write that night.
“What’s this one going to be about?” I asked.
“Famous works of pop fiction that spawned totally obscure sequels that almost no one ever reads,” she said. Then she listed some of them:
The Son of Rosemary
Return to Peyton Place
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit II
Beyond the Chocolate War
Psycho II
The Return of the Player
The Return of Little Big Man
“The titles of those books pretty much tell you what each one is a sequel to. But that’s not always the case. I’m going to embed a test in my essay so that readers can try to guess which obscure sequel belongs to which famous original. Here’s what I’ve got so far. I’m only dealing with sequels that were written by the original author. In a later essay I’ll deal with the sequels to famous novels like Gone With the Wind and Rebecca that were written after the author’s death by some hired hand.” And then she read this list to me:
The Cool Cottontail
Myron
The Exchange
Brothers
Tracy Flick Can’t Win
Peace Breaks Out
Home School
Legion
Closing Time
Sarkahn
Oliver’s Story
Running Mate
The Testaments
Imperial Bedrooms
Shadow of the Condor
A Legacy of Spies
Lila
“I’ll create some sort of scoring system,” she said, smirking at her own cleverness. “Get five correct and you are a pop-fiction fan. Get ten correct, and you are a pop-fiction fanatic. Get fifteen correct, and you are a pop-fiction expert. Get all sixteen correct and you need to get a life. Something like that.”
Then she lowered her head and went back to outlining her essay. I reached into my pocket and withdrew the old lady’s note. I stared down at its spidery scrawl. Then I looked over at Chloe. She seemed to be having so much fun with her pop-fiction piece that I didn’t want to distract her from it with some sort of angry political screed. I shoved the note into my pocket, saving it for a later time. Then I went off to the kitchen to fetch myself a snack.
Later that night, we were slumped in the sofa, sharing a bowl of popcorn and sort of semi-watching Sidney Pollack’s 1995 remake of Billy Wilder’s Sabrina, which Chloe insisted was better than the original. We had watched it at least half a dozen times before, but Chloe wanted to see it again because she was developing an essay for LAQ on film remakes that were better than the original. Her list included the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1986 remake of The Fly, and the 2010 remake of True Grit. I had been wondering for hours whether I should show the old lady’s note to Chloe. I had no idea how she might respond to it. I hadn’t read it yet because, unlike Chloe, I’m not intrigued by the idea of reading a mountain of crap in order to find a nugget of gold. She was always buying old journals and diaries at flea markets and thrift stores. She loved sifting through random people’s handwritten accounts of their lives. Personally, I don’t want to read anything that hasn’t been through at least a half dozen edits. If I told Chloe about the old lady’s letter, she’d be eager to read it. But then what? She might be upset to see that her Pop Fiction Matters blog had attracted the kind of crazy people who force handwritten notes on people and then scurry away. Conversely, she might find herself fascinated by what the letter said and eager to turn it into an essay – maybe a bit too eager. What are the odds that the old lady had fact-checked every nasty thing she had to say about Breneé Williams? Probably nil. And if Chloe, in her excitement to get it all in print, should publish something libelous about Breneé Williams, it might bring disaster down upon us. Breneé Williams was a billionaire and probably had a dozen or two high-price attorneys on permanent retainer. If she filed a suit for libel against Chloe, we could be wiped out financially even if we won in court. We might have to use all that lovely monthly subscription money just to pay our legal fees. That would put the kibosh to my dream of purchasing my grandparents’ house. Unsure of the response I might trigger, I decided to proceed with caution.
“Hey,” I said, “have you ever thought of writing about Breneé Williams?”
“The TV lifestyle guru? The social media influencer? The woman who wrote, ‘Lift yourself up by your own bootstraps and soon those boots will be Jimmy Choos?’ Why would I write about her?”
“She’s running for president,” I said.
Chloe snorted and threw a piece of popcorn at me. “No she’s not.”
“Of course she is,” I said. “It’s been on the news.”
“She’s promoting her lifestyle brand by putting her name on the ballot. That’s all. She hasn’t a chance of winning and she knows it. But suddenly every news channel is doing stories about her. And every one of those stories has mentioned her Insta feed and her seminars and her books and her YouTube channel and all her other hustles. She’s not a serious candidate.”
“Maybe not, but she’s going to be on the ballot. And it seems to me that a take down of Breneé Williams would be a golden opportunity for you. A painless way to attract a few more eyeballs and maybe even some subscriptions.”
“What do you mean ‘painless’?”
“Well, since she’s running as an independent, you can throw all the mud at her you want and not upset either the Democrats or the Republicans. She’s polling at about two percent of the electorate right now, so an essay that trips up her campaign for a week or two isn’t likely to generate too much negative feedback. But she’s also very much like a character out of a pop fiction novel. She’s a huckster, like Elmer Gantry or Tom Ripley or The Wizard of Oz. You can probably find dozens of pop fiction novels that feature characters just like her, wealthy hucksters who enter politics just to enrich themselves. The jokes would practically write themselves.”
Chloe snorted. “In my experience, jokes that practically write themselves generally don’t deserve to be written at all.”
“You know what I mean. Breneé Williams is a complete fraud, and you are just the person to point out what a cliché she is, what a charlatan she is, like something out of pulp fiction.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Chloe said. “In any case, I’ll think about it.”
I was disappointed by this response. Of course, I would have been frightened if she’d seemed overly eager to take Breneé Williams down. I was hoping for some sort of middle ground, an essay that fell short of being libelous while still managing to make Williams’s presidential ambitions look ridiculous. I debated whether or not I should pass the old lady’s note along to Chloe. In the event, I decided to hang on to it for a while longer. Perhaps later, when I was in a more daring mood, I’d actually sit down and read what was written on the note. That would tell me whether I should pass it on to Chloe or not. For now I would keep it safe by hiding it in my banjo bag. Chloe never opens that.
Oh, in case you were wondering, the answers to Chloe’s quiz are as follows:
In the Heat of the Night
Myra Breckinridge
The Firm
The Marathon Man
Election
A Separate Peace
The Graduate
The Exorcist
Catch 22
The Ugly American
Love Story
Primary Colors
The Handmaid’s Tale
Less than Zero
Six Days of the Condor
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
On Wednesday night, I was back at the Fox & Goose with Brewgrass. During our break, I sat at a table with Chloe and listened to Zac Vargas perform some of his material, including a new song called (I assume) “Hey, Hey, Yesterday.” The chorus of the song was kind of catchy.
Hey, hey, yesterday
I wish you’d come back this way.
I ain’t seen a friendly face
Since tomorrow took your place,
And brought me nothing but this endless night.
Hey, hey, yesterday
Take me back and let me stay
Where I was always safe and warm
Free from hardship and from harm,
And bathed in summer’s tender golden light.
The verses of the song reminded me of Glen Campbell’s 1969 hit “Galveston.” That song was written by Jimmy Webb during the Vietnam War era and tells of a young American soldier listening to cannons and gunfire on a battlefield while picturing his beautiful, twenty-one-year-old girlfriend standing on the beach back at Galveston, Texas. Zac’s song was a bit stranger. It referred to a young man sent “to some island in the far, far east” to fight against “some rough beast” let loose upon the world by men with “the noblest of intentions,” who thought that their “quick and fiery interventions” would cause the beast “to slink back home and hide behind his wall.”
But that is not what happened – not at all.
The beast spewed out a fire from his mouth.
A fire that spread east and west and south.
And one-by-one we saw the nations fall.
Yes, one-by-one we saw the nations fall,
The giants of the earth now forced to crawl.
It was weird and creepy and, when it was over, the audience in the pub didn’t seem to know how to react. The song was greeted with mild applause. Zac left the stage and a few minutes later, Brewgrass began its second set. I saw Chloe walk over and join Zac and his girlfriend du jour at their table. The three of them seemed to be engaged in a rather intense conversation. But, unlike a lot of other pub patrons, they were polite enough to keep their voices audible only to themselves.
Later that night, back at home, I asked Chloe what she and Zac had been discussing.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” Chloe said. “You know that song Zac sang tonight, the weird war song about some sort of apocalypse?”
“Hey, hey yesterday,” I sang, “I wish you’d come back this way…”
“Yeah, that one.”
“What about it?”
“I asked Zac what it was about and he seemed kind of embarrassed, like he didn’t want to tell me or something. I thought it might have been inspired by Game of Thrones, or some other story with war and dragons in it. I kept begging him to tell me what inspired it. Finally, he told me that he’d been sitting at Fremont Park, working on some new songs. He lives in an apartment building just a block away from there and he goes to the park a lot just so he can play his guitar without annoying the occupants of the neighboring apartments. So he was sitting over there about a week ago, and some weird old lady came up to him. She said she had seen him performing at the Fox & Goose a while back and she’d written some lyrics that she thought he might be able to use in a song. She reached into her bag and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper and held it out to Zac. She seemed kinda crazy, so he didn’t want to upset her by refusing to take the lyrics. So he took the sheet but he began to explain that he preferred to write his own lyrics. She told him, ‘That’s okay, change them up all you want and make them your own. They came to me in a dream and so I jotted them down. But I can’t do anything with them. I’m not a songwriter. Take them with my blessing. I don’t want any credit for them.’ And then she just sort of scurried away. Zac looked down and saw the lyrics handwritten on the paper in a sort of spinsterish scrawl. The handwriting was so hard to read that he thought it might have been nothing but gibberish. He was about to toss the paper in the trash, but then a word or two caught his eye. He gave the paper a closer look and then, over several minutes, he was able to decipher all of the words. He took out his own notebook and jotted the lyrics in it. He wasn’t expecting to use them, but he apparently believes in Henry James’s dictum: ‘Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.’ So he put the lyrics in his notebook and then, a few days later, he found himself coming up with a tune for them. Tonight was the first time he ever played it in public. The crowd didn’t seem to like the song much, judging from the tepid response, but I thought it was great. I told him it was one of his best songs.”
Listening to this story gave me a cold chill, like watching an especially eerie episode of The Twilight Zone.
“Did he describe the old lady?”
“No. Just said she was kind of furtive and mumbled her words. She didn’t appear to want to engage in any real interaction. Showed up out of the blue and then just sort of scurried off.” Chloe paused for a second and then added, “Why do you ask?”
I reached down into one of the compartments of my hardshell banjo case, the place where I store my finger picks, capo, extra strings, and clip-on banjo tuner. I retrieved the piece of paper that the old lady had foisted upon me in aisle nine of Taylor’s Supermarket. I handed it to Chloe and said, “A few days ago, an old woman came up to me at work and handed this to me and said to give it to my wife. Apparently she’s a fan of your political takedowns and she wants to see you sink your teeth into Breneé Williams. I didn’t have time to look at it so I just tucked away in a pocket. Later on I transferred it to my banjo case. I was reluctant to give it to you because I haven’t read it yet and I had no idea what kind of nonsense it might contain. You were working on an essay for Lady Audley about film remakes and I didn’t want to distract you with some bag lady’s crazy ramblings. But if it was the same lady that approached Zac, who knows, maybe there might be something usable in all that chicken-scratch writing of her. After all, ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday’ is probably the best song Zac has ever written. Maybe this old lady is some kind of crazy genius.”
Chloe looked down at the sheet of paper. “Damn, her handwriting is worse than mine, and mine is awful. It’s all shaky and jiggly, like she wrote it while riding on a buckboard wagon or something.”
“Is it the same handwriting as the one Zac was given?”
Chloe shook her head. “No way of knowing. After he copied the lyrics into his notebook he threw the original in the trash. Maybe next Wednesday you and he ought to compare notes. Describe what your lady looked like to him and see if his was the same person.”
“But my lady wouldn’t make eye contact with me. She kept her head lowered and I never got a look at her face.”
“Oh, well,” said Chloe, “you must be tired. Put your banjo stuff away and go to bed. I’ll take this Breneé Williams screed into my office and see if I can decipher it. We can talk about it in the morning.”
“Fine,” I said. “But don’t publish anything about Breneé Williams without letting me see it first. She’s a litigious billionaire and you don’t want to go public with anything that could be considered malicious or libelous. No matter what that old lady has to say about her, make sure you fact check everything to the nth degree. For the first time in our lives we’re – you’re – making some real money. We don’t want to do anything that might jeopardize that in any way.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chloe’s father was raised in a fundamentalist religious household. His parents believed that the only book anyone ever needed to consult was the Bible. They looked upon popular fiction as tantamount to pornography. And by “popular fiction” I don’t just mean sleazy novels written by the likes of Harold Robbins or Jacqueline Susann. Even novels like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Catholicism!) or To Kill a Mockingbird (Integration!) were frowned up. Storytelling was the art of lying, while religion was God’s truth. And no decent person preferred lies to truth. As a result, Frank Dobbins grew up craving pop fiction the way that a child denied sweets might grow up craving candy bars. He never went to college, but after leaving high school he took a job at Levinson’s Bookstore in Sacramento. Over the years, he worked his way up to the position of store manager. And, as soon as he had a home of his own, be began filling it up with books, primarily cheap paperback genre fiction – spy novels, sci-fi, Westerns, thrillers, mysteries, police procedurals, film novelizations, TV tie-ins. He liked everything but high fantasy novels. All those Narnias and Middle Earths and mythical beasts and messianic child messengers reminded him too much of the Bible. And that was the one book he wanted nothing more to do with. Thus Chloe was raised on the gospel of Mario Puzo and Daphne du Maurier and Louis L’Amour and John Grisham and Joseph Wambaugh and Agatha Christie and Michael Crichton and Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Elmore Leonard and Mary Higgins Clark and Frederick Forsyth and hundreds of other bestselling fictioneers. By the time she was fifteen she had consumed more pop fiction than most people will read in a lifetime. But she didn’t just read it. She absorbed it into her psyche. She studied it. She believed that every culture was defined by the stories it told to, and about, itself. And she didn’t believe that you could truly understand contemporary western civilization without a solid grounding in its popular culture, particularly its fiction, because so much of its other cultural media – film, TV, radio dramas, stage plays, comics, etc. – were adaptations of popular books. Vampires, werewolves, space aliens, zombies – some of the most prominent cultural tropes of the twenty-first century derived primarily from popular fiction. You could search through the pages of the ancient Greek and Latin classics and find no exact parallel for the vampires of Bram Stoker’s Dracula or the zombies of Max Brooks’s World War Z or the space aliens of Frank Herbert’s Dune. There may have been a time when you needed a decent knowledge of Achilles and Odysseus and Medusa and Pandora in order to comprehend modern life. But in the twenty-first century, those classical touchstones were much less helpful than an understanding of killer sharks and haunted cars and mafia dons and little girls who could start fires with their minds. She believed that you could never fully understand the culture you were living in, but reading popular fiction was as good a heuristic technique as you were likely to find for navigating modern life. Jesus used parables to help make life comprehensible to his followers. Chloe used popular fiction to help make modern life comprehensible to the subscribers of Pop Fiction Matters. And what, after all, is a popular novel but a long parable?
In her early twenties, Chloe became heavily involved in the local theater scene. She was particularly keen on stage plays that were based on popular novels. She worked on productions of Dracula and Frankenstein and The Bad Seed and Daddy-Long-Legs and several others. “It’s the closest you can get to understanding what it would be like to be a character in a great novel,” she told me, when explaining her love of the theater. Her goal was to put together a local theater group that would adapt Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings or Mary Stewart’s Thornyhold or Jessamyn West’s The Massacre at Fall Creek – novels that had largely been forgotten by the reading public. She and a few friends formed a sort of outlaw theater troupe for the purpose of staging plays based on largely forgotten novels. They wrote and produced a stage adaptation of Fredric Brown’s 1955 comic novel Martians, Go Home. Because they hadn’t secured the right to the material from the copyright holder, they changed the name of the piece to “Little Green Men.” They credited the script to a fictitious author, Algernon Hipp. They rented a theater space and staged only two performances for the public. The two audiences who saw the play loved it. It got a positive write up in the local Sacramento News & Review, so positive, in fact, that Chloe and company were planning to resurrect it at a larger venue. But before that could happen, they received a cease-and-desist order from an attorney who represented the estate of Fredric Brown. And that was the end of Chloe’s foray into outlaw theater.
The old woman who wrote the screed about Breneé Williams must have shared many of Chloe’s beliefs about pop fiction. Her message to Chloe contained references to more than a dozen obscure popular novels featuring conniving hucksters who longed for political power. She listed not just the titles and authors of these books, but also quoted lines from them that sounded as if they might have been written about Breneé Williams by one of her political opponents. But even stranger, she provided Chloe with a lot of dirt on Williams that wasn’t common knowledge. Apparently, Breneé Williams had been married for five years to a man named Edgar Smith. During that five-year marriage, she and Smith ran up a lot of dubious expenses and eventually had to file for bankruptcy. The old lady provided Chloe with the bankruptcy court in North Carolina that had handled the Chapter 13 filing. She even provided the case number and urged Chloe to write to the courthouse and request a copy of the filing. She’d find that Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Smith had taken out a $70,000 home-improvement loan on a house they owned in Parsonville, North Carolina, but had used most of the money buying expensive toys such as a jet ski and a Harley Davidson chopper. The Smiths sold most of these items for cash shortly before filing for bankruptcy, so that the bank couldn’t repossess them. Then they claimed in their court filing that they had already burnt through the cash they’d made. This was particularly damning because Breneé Williams was always scolding people who renege on their debts. What’s more, she had never made public the fact that she’d been married before. Her first husband was now the pastor of a mega-church in Tennessee. He was remarried and had six kids. He wasn’t likely to publicize the fact that he was once married to woman who now supported gay marriage and abortion. And he wasn’t likely to want anyone to know about the bankruptcy either. The world was full of men named Ed Smith. No one would be likely to connect him with the bankruptcy of some obscure young couple from Parsonville, NC. After divorcing Edgar Smith, Breneé Williams had reclaimed her married name, Breneé Billingsley. Later, after marrying a wealthy wrestling promoter named Duane Williams, she had taken his last name. Nowhere in her official biography or any of her books was there any mention of the fact that, for five years, she was Mrs. Edgar Smith.
The old lady’s message mentioned several other unflattering facts about Breneé Williams. It noted that she and Edgar Smith had once been sued by a neighboring landowner who claimed that they had improperly built a fence on land that was rightfully his, thus depriving him the use of roughly a thousand square feet of his own property. The case was settled in small-claims court and the Smiths were ordered to remove the fence and pay all court costs. The old lady provided the small-claims court case number in case Chloe wanted to verify the facts. Chloe didn’t have the time or the resources to check up on every bit of dirt the old lady had dug up on Breneé Williams. She went online and ordered a copy of their bankruptcy filing. A few days later it arrived in the mail. It seemed to verify everything the crazy lady’s letter had asserted. This lent credence to all her other charges. Chloe went online and ordered copies of the pop fiction novels the old lady had mentioned. She wanted to verify the quotes in them.
Eventually, Chloe and I got around to examining all of the dirt that we (thanks to the old lady) had dug up on Breneé Williams. Even I was impressed by the breadth of it all, and by how well documented it was. I told Chloe I was okay with her going to press with all this material.
“I’m happy to write all this stuff up and publish it on Pop Fiction Matters,” she told me, “but it seems like taking a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito. Breneé Williams doesn’t stand a chance of winning the presidency.”
“Sure,” I said, “but in a tight race, she could end up being a spoiler and possibly subverting the will of the people.”
And so Chloe went ahead and published a take down of Breneé Williams. Prior to the publication of Chloe’s takedown, Williams had been polling at nearly five percent. Afterwards, she dropped to about one percent. We kept waiting for Breneé Williams, or her lawyers, to file some kind of massive lawsuit against us. But she dealt with Chloe’s disclosures by simply ignoring them. She wasn’t an ordinary candidate for president. She wasn’t required to give interviews to the mainstream press in order to get her message out to the people. She had her own media empire. And as far as the Bre-Hive was concerned, Chloe King and Pop Fiction Matters didn’t even exist.
As for the rest of the media world, they paid quite a bit of attention to Chloe’s takedown. Mainstream media outlets that had given uncritical attention to Breneé Williams now had to do an about face and delve into her background. They found even more dirt than the old lady had. It seemed clear that, come November, Breneé Williams’s candidacy was going to be a nonissue in the national election. She’d be lucky if she garnered even a hundred thousand votes. But Breneé Williams’s loss was Chloe’s gain. The exposé brought Pop Fiction Matters hundreds of additional subscribers.
“It almost feels like taking money under false pretenses,” she told me. “I didn’t do anything really. It was that old lady friend of yours.”
“She’s no friend of mine,” I said. “I don’t even know her name.”
“But where do you think she came from?” Chloe asked. “Do you think it’s the same woman who gave Zac the lyrics to ‘Hey, Hey, Yesterday’? That song seems to suggest that we will soon be at war with China or something. Who could possibly know all this stuff?”
Who, indeed?