Free Long Past Stopping by Oran Canfield Page B

much is it, eight hundred?”
    â€œEight fifty.”
    â€œOkay. I’m going to the bank this afternoon.”
    â€œNo problem. Thanks,” I said, hanging up the phone, feeling like a piece of shit. It wasn’t taking money from my dad that bothered me. He had just bought a three-million-dollar house in Santa Barbara. He could afford it. It was that I was surviving off this guy’s guilt. Whenever I saw him, about once every two or three years, I always felt as if I were his dark side in physical form: a hunched-over, chain-smoking, cynical bastard who presented solid proof that he was capable of leaving his pregnant wife with a one-year-old child, and that maybe he wasn’t the self-help guru he was praised as. To be fair, I never gave him much reason to think anything else of me. I experienced such an awful combination of anxiety and anger whenever I saw him that I had a hard time even talking.
    I had always thought that his whole self-help shtick was a racket, but his new book exceeded the limits of what I thought was possible in terms of sheer vapidity.
    â€œAsk me about the book,” he’d said the last time I had dinner with him.
    â€œUh, why do I need to ask? Can’t you just tell me?”
    â€œThis is how people get to write off their expenses,” he answered.
    â€œOkay. How’s the book?”
    â€œIt’s going great, we’re still on the New York Times bestseller list, and we’re working on the Second Helping .”
    â€œ Second Helping ? What’s that?” I asked before realizing I probably didn’t want to hear the answer.
    â€œWe’re calling it a Second Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul . Get it?” “Yeah,” I said, unable to muster any enthusiasm. Who buys that shit? I thought to myself. A Second Helping? I hadn’t even been able to make it through ten pages, let alone the whole book.
    There were still about five boxes of Chicken Soup for the Soul books in my mom’s garage from when Jack had tried to get Kyle and me to walk around and sell them to neighbors. Kyle gave it a shot one day and came back with twelve bucks, half of which he was supposed to send back to Jack.
    I never believed the saying “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” I judged things based on appearance all the time, and although I wasn’t always right, I wasn’t always wrong. This book’s cover provided me with more than enough information to judge it by. Underneath its already cheesy title, it said, 101 Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit . It looked like the Hallmark section of the drugstore repackaged in book form.
    As the book started getting attention, and more and more people asked me, “Well, what’s so terrible about it?” I found that my answer, “Well…um…I haven’t actually read it, but come on…It’s called Chicken Soup for the Soul, for Christ’s sake!” was sadly not always enough proof of how bad it had to be. The next time I was at my mom’s house, I went to the garage and cracked open a copy of it to get more ammunition.
    The story I opened to was about a seven-year-old kid who wanted to make a bumper sticker that read “Peace, Please! Do It for Us Kids.” He didn’t have any money, so he asked for a loan from Jack’s cowriter, Mark, in order to print up a thousand stickers. As manipulative as the writing was, I tried to keep an open mind and get behind the kid’s effort—however ineffectual—to bring about world peace. A few pages in, though, the kid starts listening to Mark’s Sell Yourself Rich series of cassette tapes, and before you know it, he starts scamming free shit from Joan Rivers, negotiating with Hallmark (no surprise), and, by the end of the story, has made almost five thousand bucks. The message was that even a seven-year-old can make money by listening to Mark’s tapes. In just three pages