Coming to This Area . . .

I was on the phone with my mother one Saturday morning trying to explain the concept of broadband Internet service to her, but every ten minutes my call waiting service beeped. After a while, it was every five minutes. Before I was even half-way through explaining broadband to my mother, whoever was trying to reach me must have been speed-dialing, because soon the beeps were returning every thirty seconds.

Then they stopped.

Later, when I was finally wrapping things up, there was a pounding on my door.

"So, do you get it now?" I asked, while the pounding continued.

"I'm not sure," my mother said.

"Okay," I said, trying to search my mind for any sort of analogy I hadn't yet used. I'd run through a list as long as my leg, comparing broadband versus dial-up to everything I could think of: pouring handfuls of marbles into the mouth of a jar versus dropping them in one by one through a tiny hole cut in the lid; boiling soup beans in a cast-iron cauldron over a huge fire versus cooking them in a crock pot; and on and on.

I thought of one last illustration. "Just think of a dial-up Internet connection as Paw Paw Creek; then think of broadband as the Amazon river. The flow of information would be wider and faster through—" I paused, waiting for my mother to finish with, "A-ha! The Amazon. I get it, now."

While the pounding on my door was replaced by the sound of a chainsaw roaring to life, followed by the ripping sounds of splitting wood, my mother said, "So, this has nothing to do with my television?"

The sound of the chainsaw stopped just as I sighed heavily into the phone. "No. Not at all. Not even close," I said, then I heard the footsteps of someone charging up with the stairs.

"Well, it's coming to this area," my mother said.

"GODDAMN IT! Who are you on the PHONE with?" Citizen Jim demanded to know.

"MY MOTHER!" I yelled.

"WHATEVER!" Jim shouted, and took the phone from me. He said into the mouthpiece "Goodbye!" and threw the receiver through my open office window.

"Now, why'd you have to go and do that?" I asked.

"I've been trying to call you for nine hours! I finally broke down and begged Meredith to fly me up here in that plane she bought so she could make extra money by crop dusting and barn storming when she's not winning disco dancing contests," he said.

"Now that you're here, what the hell do you want?" I asked Citizen Jim.

"And don't try and tell me you were talking to your mother all this time!" he yelled.

"What do you want?" I asked again.

"I want to TALK TO YOU!" he screamed. He was so worked up that the veins in his forehead, neck and ears were throbbing like a big toe after receiving a good whack-whack-whack with a hammer.

"Please calm down, Precious Lamb," I said. "You're going to have a stroke."

He moved his arms around wildly, as if he were beating a pair of bongo drums with a set of nunchucks. Except his hands were balled into empty fists. "I'm gonna STROKE YOU with all twelve of my knuckles if you don't shut up and let me tell you what happened today!"

"But Jim, you should only have ten knuckles," I said.

"I got extra ones just to punch you even HARDER when you won't SHUT UP and LISTEN to me!" he said.

I sat down and stared up at Citizen Jim with rapt attention, not saying another word. When he glanced at me, he said, "So you're shut up for sure, now?"

I nodded my head, and smiled, still not saying a word.

He peered at me for a moment with squinty eyes. "You're not peeing yourself, are you?" he asked. He looked at my cat, Mister Meme, and said, "That's the look she always used to get on her face when she'd forget to sit down on the commode to do her business."

While Mister Meme hissed and clawed at the air near Citizen Jim, I shook my head violently.

"Okay, well, do you remember that guy Corey?" Jim asked.

I shrugged.

"Corey? That rep who had the hots for me and used to send me all kinds of special crap from the Random House catalog, like first editions of Cormac McCarthy bound in the skin of the mentally ill and signed with the blood of Mexican whores and stuff like that?"

I nodded, making a face.

"Yeah. THAT Corey," Citizen Jim said. "Okay. So, I found out through the grapevine that Corey stopped being a publisher's rep, and now he's an agent with some kind of mega-management company in New York City. And so, after I heard that, I got me a great idea."

I finally broke my silence. "Oh, no! Please don't tell me you—"

"HUSH! I thought maybe that'd be my big chance to get representation for The Downwindies," Jim said. "So I called him up."

"And?"

"And he claims he can't remember me," Citizen Jim said.

"Well, it was a long time ago," I offered.

"Yeah, but he remembers Granny and Carol and you and Bunny and Ben Tundenfunden and Susan Daniel and Meredith and everyone else who ever worked at the bookstore when he used to come calling."

"But not you?"

"Nope," Citizen Jim said.

"Well, then, he's full of shit," I said. "I never liked him, anyway."

"Who cares if you never liked him? You never like anyone who likes me!" Citizen Jim said. "Anyway, that's not the end of the story."

I sighed. "Okay. Tell me the rest," I said.

"Well, I decided to call Elaine to see if she knew what was going on with Corey. You remember Elaine, right?"

I shook my head.

"Yeah. Right," Citizen Jim said. "She only sent you a thousand books from the Random House catalog when she was our rep."

"Oh, her. Okay. So," I said. "What'd she say?"

"She told me something horrifying," Jim said. He closed his eyes and dropped his head. "She said Corey went to some crackpot bunch of scientists and had every memory of me zapped from his brain like kidney stones!"

My first reaction was the worst: I laughed. I laughed so hard I could barely say, "I never heard of such a thing!"

"What're you LAUGHING AT? It's true!" Citizen Jim yelled, coming toward me with his arm drawn back, ready to strike. "I need me an agent! And Corey would have been perfect!"

"But you didn't even like him. You said he made you feel creepy and dirty every time he walked into the room," I reminded Jim. "You said there was something sneaky and sinister about him, like he'd probably root through the mouth of a dead man looking for gold teeth instead of trying to do CPR."

"All the more reason he'd be a great agent," Jim said. "God, but you're slow on the uptake!"

"So what're you going to do?" I asked.

Jim shrugged. "I don't know. I guess I have two choices. I can, one, represent myself—"

"Bad idea," I said immediately. "Remember what happened to poor Ted Bundy."

"I'm gonna SMACK YOU SIMPLE!" Citizen Jim said. "I can do that, or I can do what Sonny keeps telling me to do."

"Which is?"

"Well, he says my best chance at being published is to send my book to Vantage Press and pay them to print up a few thousand copies. If I do that, you're gonna hafta drive around the country with me and help me sell them out of the back of my Jeep."

"Okay, but—"

"NO BUTS! This is all your fault, anyway. So you need to quit your job and take those cats to the pound and break up with all your girlfriends here in Hillbilly Land. I'll be back in a few weeks with those books, so you better have a marketing plan drawn up! And learn to play the guitar, because I wrote some songs to go along with the stories in my book," he said. He turned before he started down the stairs. "And don't go out with that white shit on your face, or we'll lose sales!"

A moment later, my portable telephone came sailing through the window of my office, clocking me on the head. When it fell to the floor, I heard my mother's voice squawking from the ear piece. "I hope that broadband helps with the phone reception," she was saying as I brought the phone to my ear. "I haven't heard a word you've said for the last ten minutes."

But my mind was elsewhere, thinking of Citizen Jim and how much I wanted to help him realize his dream of becoming a bestselling author. I knew we could do it!

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