My book club night with "Last Baby Boomer"

(721 words)

Being the author of a book a room full of strangers like is like being the father of a beloved honor student on parent-teacher conference night when everyone from the principal to the custodian assures you your kid’s special and has a bright future.

I now know this.

It happened to me Saturday.

A Pittsburgh-area woman heard me on John McIntire’s radio show and said my book’s premise instantly caught her fancy.

She belongs to a monthly book club and it was her turn to select for a group of 18 avid readers.

Understand, picking just the right book is not unlike a friend asking you to fix them up on the perfect blind date. The two will spend a lot of time together and if the date is rude, boring or has bad manners it’ll reflect poorly on you.

And with Denise there was one other factor: “I didn’t want to go with a bestseller.”

She couldn’t have as of right now gotten more opposite of bestseller than “The Last Baby Boomer.”

She sent me a Facebook friend request and told me of her selection. She wanted to know if I’d attend a Bridgeville party where my book would be discussed. There would be food, wine and lively conversation.

I know I didn’t ask, “So how much is this going to cost me?” but I remember wondering how much this was going to cost me.

In fact, it was free.

Note: if you want to make a fast $100 do the same as Denise did and ask how much I’ll pay for the privilege.

Hell, I’ll even come and clean your gutters.

It was such a great night.

I wonder if people truly realize just how warping 15 years of rejection can be to a psyche.

Remember, no agent or publisher ever said the book sucked. They mostly just said they didn’t know how they could sell it. It wasn’t science fiction. It wasn’t pop. It wasn’t historical romance, creative memoir or allegorical fantasy.

I never once strove to write one of those.

I just wanted to write something entertaining.

Saturday convinced me I succeeded.

It was a great turnout and the dynamic was for me very relaxed.

I’m used to being in a situation like that where I’m concerned about selling books. In this case, I’d sold 18 books before I’d ever set foot in the room.

And they’d read the heck out of the thing. I’ve been in college classrooms where paying students were far less engaged.

Sure, I was the presiding professor in each of those educational disappointments, but let’s not get hung up on details.

And I had this additional advantage: I was the first author in 10 years who’d ever deigned to visit their humble little group.

So that put me one up on Grisham, Rowling and Gaiman, not to mention Twain, Steinbeck and Shakespeare who at least had good excuses.

After introductions, I talked for 20 minutes about how the book came to be. And the whole time I’m thinking, okay, I’ve made a nice impression. How can I get out of here before I blow it by picking an unseemly fight with a critic?

It never happened. After a convivial turkey dinner, we sat in Russ’s living room and each reader had their say.

It was like an out-of-body experience. My book had made so many of them happy. 

I remember several times when they were pointedly discussing minor plot developments or character reactions and thinking, “Man, one of these days I’m going to have to sit down and really read this book. It sounds great!”

A bunch of them told me it was exactly that.

The best parts were when several of them said how undercurrent themes of hope and joy left them feeling elated.

A night that began with me wondering about when to make a timely exit ended with me not wanting to leave at all.

I’m grateful to Denise, Russ and all my new friends for such a wonderful evening.

So now I’m eschewing all other promotional endeavors in favor of getting invited to other lively book groups.

One caveat: I was kidding about cleaning your gutters.

Ladders can be dangerous.

Besides, after Saturday I no longer need to ascend any steps to feel elevated.

Related . . .

I buy books

About those typos …

My book is $20

On being nice & the nice article PG wrote about me & my book

Latrobe Bulletin features me & “Last Baby Boomer”

This book is NOT free: my new novel for sale

I am becoming left handed

I may not be the best writer, but I’ll wager I’m the only writer who can do 10 regulation Army pull-ups and juggle.

Not simultaneously. Not yet.

It’s probably not the kind of boast you’d hear from writers like Stephen King or John Grisham, but it suits me.

If even hack psychologists diagnose I’m trying to compensate for so many professional shortcomings, so be it.

I like the fact that if I ever had to arm wrestle either of those two best-selling titans I’d have them both screaming uncle and racing back to their limos.

But that achievement will pale in comparison to my next great quest.

I’m becoming left handed. I’ve been willing myself to cease using my dominant right hand for all the menial tasks I reflexively summon it to do.

It dawned on me years ago the laziest part of my whole ever-loving lazy body was my deadbeat left hand. The right hand did everything and when it came to doing even the least of motor skills, my left hand never bothered to lift a finger.

It was unfair. It was like a marriage where the one spouse good-naturedly does all the work while the other one sits around and schemes of doing things like becoming left-handed.

But I digress.

So now I brush my teeth, shave, work the computer mouse and do things like button shirts with my left hand.

I  still wouldn’t trust the southpaw to toss darts when there’s a pregnant woman within 10 feet of the cork, but it can certainly lift a 12-ounce beer mug every once in a while.

Our over-reliance on our dominant hands throws our whole bodies out of balance.

It’s true. Ask any tailor. They’ll tell you our dominant hands are as much as an inch longer than the ones that do little more than dangle. Can you imagine how the progression of such natural atrophy could effect people who make sleeves?

My goal is pure ambidexterity. 

It’s just so cool not to mention, well, handy. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were ambidextrous and would paint with both hands, switching when ever one got tired. British artist Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873) was famous for drawing with both hands simultaneously -- a horse’s head with one hand, a buck’s antlered head with the other.

Benjamin Franklin was ambidextrous and signed both the Declaration of the Indpendence and the Constitution left-handed. That he didn’t think to sign one right handed and the other lefty is the only intellectual blemish on America’s greatest rascal.

This isn’t purely theoretical. Painful misadventure will result in many of us one day winding up in slings. Worst case scenario: What if during one of my midnight strolls I stumble into a bear with a palate so discriminating it consumes only right arms?

Much of my motivation comes from being a really bad writer -- and not the occupational kind, although skimpy professional accomplishments heave the subject into question.

It’s my handwriting. It is atrocious. Elegant penmanship is something I so admire. It’s a vanishing art I turned my back on in about the fifth grade when I saw Jon Logue writing in little block letters and thought it looked really neat.

Today, it’s impossible for me to writing anything in cursive beyond my own name, a pathetic scrawl that.

So I’ve for years been resenting my right hand. Even what little I ask it to do, it does poorly. If it were a second baseman, I’d yank it from the line-up and give the new kid a shot.

That’s what I’ve been doing with my left hand.

My goal is to learn to sign my name left handed in a more stylish flourish than I do with my right. That’d be a good gauge of success.

Studies show a direct correlation between involvement in motor skill exercises and brain growth. Our brains sleep walk through routine tasks, but comes alive when we challenge it with unfamiliar tasks.

My ultimate goal is the increase my brain power to a density sufficient enough to differentiate between foolhardy tasks and ones that might lead to actual income

And I hope observers will one day be able to detect results more tangible than equidistant arms that look snazzy in sleeves.

Being known as someone who writes badly with both hands would be professionally unwise for an otherwise even-handed guy like me.

Justice and John Grisham

Here’s another indication of just how massive my ego is: Wednesday night I had an opportunity to forfeit one night of professorial instruction in favor of letting my students hear another writer speak.

It was not an easy call. I had to carefully weigh whether they would benefit more from a ninth three-hour class with me or one hour with a writer who might shed some insights into aspects of the writing profession. The other writer?

John Grisham.

He was invited to speak to The Innocence Institute at Point Park University in Pittsburgh where I teach creative non-fiction. Two of my students, Matt Stroud and Marie DoRego, are pillars of the program that painstakingly researches cases of death row inmates who claim to have been wrongly convicted.

They devoted long hours with grizzled program director Bill Moushey, a legendary local reporter, and thought, gee, maybe other aspiring journalists would benefit from the experience.

Partly out of laziness, I decided, yeah, well, let’s let them hear what a guy who’s sold more than 250 million books has to say. The students would have to write about the evening.

Twelve hours later, I’m convinced I made the right decision. But not for any of the reasons you might suspect.

Sure, Grisham was great. He was funny, handsome and spoke with a drawling eloquence that made everything he said compelling.

In short, he was everything that the three men who told unforgettable stories are not.

They are Greg Bright, John Thompson and Douglas Dilosa.

You may never have heard their names and but for saintly work by people in other Innocence Institutes you never would have. Thompson was five days from a date with a Louisiana electric chair.

The men spent a combined 58 years in Louisiana’s Angola State Penitentiary, one of the most notorious, soul-devouring prisons on earth.

They took turns telling their stories from stools behind metal podiums on a barren stage. Their demographic breakdown roughly equalled that of our nation’s prisons. Bright and Thompson were poor blacks from challenging backgrounds convicted of murdering strangers.

Dilosa on September 27, 1986, was a lot like me. He was a happily married father of two young children he adored. He was convicted of killing his wife for insurance money and then, according to prosecutors, staging a crime scene to make it look like it had been done by two intruders he swore were getting away with murder. Prosecutors said he’d strangled his wife, mangled himself and tied himself up to foil investigators.

Each was sent to Angola, Dilosa for 14 years, Thompson for 17, and Bright for 27.

Eventually, all were exonerated. A system that in every way was stacked against them said oops. Oops, but not sorry. None of the men were compensated for the lost years.

They talked about the indelible stigma that comes from being wrongly convicted in a society that smugly assures itself, hey, the dude had to be guilty of something.

But as Grisham’s 2006 non-fiction book “The Innocent Man” details, our criminal justice system is rife with laziness and outright corruption. It happens with police, lawyers, junk science, snitch testimony and indifferent judges who mars a system that strives for fairness.

Wrong men are convicted while guilty men roam free.

Later, I coaxed my students to talk to the men at the follow-up reception. It’s where I always get the best stories, I said.

And I couldn’t resist. I cornered Bright. He told me even after 27 years in Angola, he never stopped believing the system that put him away would eventually free him. He said he has no bitterness, was thrilled the Saints won the Super Bowl, and that he hadn’t seen “The Shawshank Redemption.”

He said the worst thing about being in prison was hearing the prison chaplain tell him his mother died thinking her son would be executed for a heinous crime she knew he did not commit. He said the best thing about being free is just being free.

Me and two of my young male students were talking when I saw Dilosa talking to one of their female classmates.

They thought it might be rude to interrupt. Nonsense, I said. Your job is to get a good story out of this. It can be done without being rude.

Maybe by them, but not by me. I went over and swamped the whole conversation. I just had too many questions.

He said he thought of committing suicide to spare his sons the indignities of prison visits. He said they found the “expert witness” who showed the jury how any man could tie himself up without assistance at a state fair. The guy was a professional contortionist.

As he was about to leave I had one last question: “How ‘bout them Saints!”

Dilosa fairly quaked with rage.

“I was furious they won the Super Bowl,” he said. “It deludes the people of Louisiana into thinking everything’s all right when innocent men are going through absolute hell every day of their lives.”

When it was over, I drove to my mom’s apartment in the South Hills where I stay with my 3-year-old daughter on nights when I teach class. I hugged mom, told her I loved her, then climbed into the bed where my father slept before he died in 2004 and later my grandfather before he died in 2008.

I cuddled my sweet little darling and said a prayer that someday a loving God will bring justice to all the wrongly convicted men and women who survive in prisons on the slim hopes that one day they might enjoy a single moment like the ones I enjoy throughout each and every day.

And I prayed that He will show a mercy undeserved to men like me for not doing more to help men like them.