The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy Read Online Free PDF Page A

treat celebrities. They handle them with kid gloves. I wear steel mesh ones. I also carry a whip and a stool. And when I’m in the cage with them I never, ever let them know I’m afraid. If I did they’d eat me alive. There’s something else that sets me apart from the others—and I’m not referring here to my wardrobe or to my uncommonly short, four-footed partner with the doofus ears and the unwholesome eating habits. It’s simply that, well, some rather ugly things have this way of happening when I’m around. That’s because memoirs, good ones at least, are about dirty secrets past and present. Generally, there’s someone around who wants those secrets to stay safely buried. And will go to any length to make sure that they do. Just one of the many reasons why my days and nights doing the Claude Rains thing were behind me. Or so I had hoped and prayed.
    I had given that all up so as to concentrate on novel number three. Yes, there was a novel number two, Such Sweet Sorrow, about the stormy marriage between a famous novelist and famous actress. Doesn’t ring a bell? I’m not surprised. It hardly even got reviewed, unless you count that snotty capsule in The New Yorker, which called it “an appalling waste of trees.” That one really hurt, because only God can make a tree. I don’t know who or what makes critics. Possibly some form of virulent fungus. As for novel number three … it had been in progress for nearly four years now. Frankly, it was going a little slowly. Frankly, all I had to show for it was one paragraph. More of an image, really. A creak on the stairs. Not that this was all that I’d written. Hell, no. I’d written hundreds and hundreds of pages more. Whole plots, subplots, characters … You name it, I’d written it. And scrapped it. When you’re young, writing is about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. You plunge recklessly ahead, utterly fearless, utterly convinced that no one has ever before done what you’re doing. That gets harder as you get older. Because you realize that everything’s already been said before—by better writers than you, by lesser writers than you and by you. Not that I was giving in to it. I rose early every morning and retreated to the chapel. It was a small chapel, one narrow room with no electricity and not much in it—one Franklin stove, one harvest table, one chair, one oil lamp, one typewriter, one former genius. There I sat, day after day, waiting for the damned thing to bubble to the surface. And waiting. But it wouldn’t come. I was even beginning to wonder if it was there at all. This was me facing a cold, hard reality—that I simply didn’t have anything more to say. Possibly I was even through.
    Fortunately, there was plenty to keep me occupied outside. Autumn’s your busy season in the country. Apples and pears to pick, firewood to lay in for winter, gardens to turn under, storm windows to repair, downed leaves to be gathered and shredded into mulch. The garden shed needed re-roofing. The battered old Land Rover needed its winter oil and its plow blade. There were rotten foundation sills to be replaced in the old carriage barn, one corner of which I was in the process of jacking up with the aid of a young local named Dwayne Gobble, who had come into our lives a few weeks back.
    Know how every once in a while you’ll be inching your way along a narrow, treacherous country road in the middle of a violent storm—trying desperately not to wrap your car and yourself around a tree—and some heavy metal testosterone case in a mondo pickup truck comes roaring up on your tail with all sixteen of his brights on, honking at you to speed up or move over or simply die? Meet Dwayne Gobble. That’s how I did. I hit the brakes right there in the middle of the road, got out of the car and suggested the pinhead might want to step out of his truck so he wouldn’t bleed all over his nice dashboard when I hit him. I’ve been known to get a little