Free Pocket Kings by Ted Heller

Jill Conway had a first novel coming out soon; the galleys had just been printed and Jill needed it blurbed. Quickly. Beverly had read it and it was “very promising and funnyish and quite brilliant” and “sure to make a huge splash.” Th is Jill Conway, who’s only twenty-seven, “absolutely adored” Plague Boy and “practically has whole chapters of it memorized.” Knowing that Bev knew me, Jill had asked her to ask me to read it and give it a nice line or two. “I was just about to call you, Frank,” she said to me. She reached into her handbag and pulled out the galleys to Joltin’ Jill’s novel.
    Th e name of the book, I saw, was Saucier: A Bitch in the Kitchen. Jill, Bev told me, was a graduate of the Cornell College of Wine and Cheese and Reduction Sauces, or whatever it’s called, and this was a roman à chef about toiling in upscale New York restaurants, the kind of places where they spend weeks training svelte, vapid girls how to not answer the phone. Th e book, Beverly said, “is going to do to restaurants what Plague Boy did to fatal epidemics.”
    â€œIs it pronounced ‘saucier,’ ” I said to Bev, rhyming the word with mossier, “or ‘saucier’?” rhyming it with flossy hay.
    â€œ Th at’s the thing!” she said, dark eyes twinkling neurotically. “You pronounce it the way you want to!”
    Uh-huh.
    Th e book, coming in at a slim 198 pages, was placed in my hands, and the smell of a book in galleys quickly vanquished the aroma of lattes, macchiatos, frappuccinos, and the nearby bathroom’s suspect plumbing. It’s a truly terrific smell, but only when it’s your own book. If it’s someone else’s, it’s like changing the diapers of somebody else’s baby.
    I promised Beverly, who’s never done one single thing wrong to me other than have the gall to be more successful, that I would take a look at it. I’ve got, I said, nothing else to do.
    â€œYou’re really not working on anything?”
    â€œWell, I have a book out there now. You know, making the rounds.”
    I told her that Glenn Tyler at Lakeland & Barker had turned it down but called me a Master of the Suburban Mimetic and compared it to Joseph Conrad’s Th e Secret Sharer, and she was pretty impressed. (I left out that my book had given him a kind of spiritual rash.) I said I’d e-mail her a copy.
    â€œYou know,” she said, “Deke Rivers is a friend of mine. He runs Last Resort Press . . . they’re the most prominent self-publishing house in New York. You could—”
    â€œNope. Let’s drop that idea right away please.”
    After being paid money for my first book, after being paid a lot less for my second, paying someone to print my third was doing a face plant on rock bottom and was out of the question. I once worked at a Friendly’s and would prefer going back to wearing a hairnet and making Fribbles.
    I knew she was just trying to be helpful and I thanked her.
    â€œAnd the Plague Boy movie?” she asked.
    â€œNothing new on that. Th e script’s been written. Pacer Burton is still going to direct.”
    â€œSo what do you do with your time then?”
    Do I dare fess up? Should I keep this to myself? Ah, why not . . .
    â€œWell, Bev, I play poker online, to tell you the truth.”
    â€œYou’re kidding me, right?”
    My lack of words, expression, and movement indicated to her that, no, I wasn’t kidding.
    â€œSo, uh, do you win at least?” she asked.
    â€œI’ve won over twenty thousand dollars. I won three grand just before I ran into you. In about twenty minutes as a matter of fact.” Shaving off twenty minutes just to make her ill.
    I watched her calculate: Hmm, it takes me two months to write a short story. . . . if the short story gets published I maybe get two thousand dollars for it. . . . this