The Fan Told Me She was Leaving

   I thought I was in love before. Really, none of us are in love. But we’re afraid of not being in love, like if we don’t have it we’ll die alone. The truth is we die alone anyway, in love or not. We love out of selfishness. Whether it’s real or not, it can still hurt us. Like God, or Heaven, or Hell. And there has to be some beauty in that somewhere, even if I can’t see it.

The room I write in is usually clouded in smoke so thick that sometimes I have trouble seeing the computer screen while I’m writing. Most of the time I’m not even smoking, just leaving the cigarette hanging over the edge of the ashtray letting it burn like incense. It’s exactly how I wrote my first novel, and my second, and even my seventh.

Used to, when I’d be on a book tour, I’d sit on stage with a cigarette burning on a stool next to me, picking it up every few minutes for a small drag. After I couldn’t do that anymore I would drive my car, a clunky 70s Oldsmobile with original leather interior seats with burns, rips, stains, and wrinkles in them, to the venue an hour early just so I could load my car up with as much smoke as possible. When fans started realizing it was me who was sitting in my car I started renting a hotel room not far from where my reading was. People started rushing me there, too, eventually.

One time when I was at a Hilton I rented the highest room on the tenth floor, it was in Columbus, Ohio I remember. I was sitting there at the window, my cigarettes burning in the trays and my room slowly becoming hazy, when I heard a knock at the door. This was only a few years ago and my novel, Gonads, had just been released. I was touring the entire East United States from Rhode Island down to New York to Charlotte to Tampa, and dozens of places in between. I scooted my chair out from the window and walked over to the peep hole in the door, barely glancing at myself in the mirror on the dresser as I walked in front of it. I knew it was some fan wanting something from me. Sometimes they want an autograph or for me to read their manuscript. It was a smaller guy, probably mid-twenties, and he was dressed like a kid going to church.

“What?” I hollered, staring at him with one eye through the peep hole in the door.

“Um, Mis-Mister Podler?” the boy asked me. He was timid and shy, but I knew better than to trust anybody that seemed timid and shy. I also knew better than to trust people who didn’t seem timid and shy.

“What?” I demanded again.

“I was, uh, wondering, if I might uh,” and he baffled on like that for another five seconds. Then he finally spit it out. He said, “Could I maybe get an autograph on your book?”

“Showing’s in another hour. I’ll sign it then.”

“Right, I know,” the boy said. “But I won’t be here and I really want an autograph.”

“Tough shit,” I told him. And I went back to my chair staring out the window and watching the traffic on the interstate, the busy people in and out of the hotel, and the hanging willows over a small stream across the way. I didn’t even look for that boy.

It was ten minutes before my reading and I was making my way down to my car, the Oldsmobile. I noticed a gathering of about one hundred people forming out in the parking lot, all waiting on me no doubt. I took a drag from my cigarette, headed down the back stairwell and out the back door. That’s when I saw him again, that church-going boy.

I said, “Look,” and before I was finished he had tackled me to the ground, grabbed my arm in a way that his entire body was laying on it, and I felt a sharp pain in my right hand. He jumped up, running as fast as he could without looking back. It was really that quick that it had happened. That boy had chopped off the tip of my right index finger right at the knuckle, my writing finger. The same knuckle that was good luck to Percy in Gonads.

I shrieked out in both pain and anger as he ran off, a trail of dots of my blood spotting the ground like footprints following that boy. I eventually made my way to the front, called the police, gave them a report, and got what was left of my finger taken care of the best it could be. I looked at it before they bandaged it up. A clean cut with bone, a few edges of skin, blood, and a small amount of muscle staring back up at me. The bleeding never really stopped.

I never knew what that boy wanted with my finger, whether he was going to sell it, put it in a jar on his mantle, or eat it. I suppose it didn’t really matter, it was gone and I was never getting it back. Columbus was never getting me back either.

I called my ex-wife a few days later. Said, “You see the news?”

“Yeah,” she said, and that was it.

“I can’t believe it,” I told her while I looked down at my finger wrapped in a bandage, rotating my palm toward me then away from me. It wasn’t top news, but I did manage to make it on a small segment. The headline read, Bestselling Author Gets Finger Chopped Off by Crazy Fan. When she didn’t say anything I was wondering why I had even called her. I could hear people in the background, like she was at a mall, or somewhere else busy with the mumblings of people.

“Why are you calling?” she asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. And that was the truth, I really didn’t know why. I was in another hotel in Dallas preparing for another reading. I had called the police for security this time. Parishka, my agent, said it was something I had to do and I wouldn’t be doing anymore readings or signings without security. “I’m in Dallas,” I said. “You coming to my reading?”

“No,” she said bluntly. Then she hung up the phone and I went on to my reading.

She did come, I saw her standing with her arms crossed by the door. I didn’t smile at her, barely even acknowledged her standing there. I made just as much eye contact with her as I did with anybody else in the crowd. Everybody was more interested in the story of my missing finger than they were with my reading of Gonads. They were yelling, “Where is it?” Or, “How does it feel?” Or, “Can I have the left one?”

I was trying to sign books for people, but the pain was too much and my signature sucked. I stopped about halfway through, after a good two hundred people. When I went to leave everybody that was in line went into a complete and total frenzy. They hollered and screamed, cursed and spat. The officer rushed me to a cab that Parishka had called for me and as we drove down the road I could still see them chasing the car. They were throwing their copies of my books at the car, a few slamming into the back windshield with a loud thud. Gonads was my longest book yet, topping six-hundred pages. And nearly one hundred copies were flying through the air.

They don’t love me, they just want to use me. They just wanted something from me so they could say they had it, or to sell it to somebody else so they could say they had it. That’s all it ever is.

I went to a different hotel this time and after I got in and sat on the bed I called her again. Said, “Thanks for coming.”

“Why do you keep calling me?” she asked me.

I told her, “I don’t know.” Said, “I think it’s the only thing I know how to do.”

I laid back on the bed, my breathing heavy like I was out of breath, and my finger throbbing. We didn’t say anything for a while and when we don’t say anything she leaves. It was completely quiet in the hotel except for the fan whirling above my head. And like the fan was whispering it to me, I knew that was the last time I would talk to her again.

I didn’t call her and she didn’t call me. Even on the days I was in Dallas she never came to a single reading or signing event. Gonads had reached number one on the New York Time’s Bestseller list, my third book to do so. I started handing out fake fingertips at my readings and everybody went nuts over them. Gonads sold more copies than my last four books combined. It was easily my highest-selling book and I should have been the happiest I had ever been.

It was in the way she left, in the way she stopped talking to me. It was very similar to the way I felt like my bestselling book hadn’t sold a single copy. Like it doesn’t matter anyway, and in a lot of ways it doesn’t but in some ways it does. It was in those things that I found truth, that we all just want to die with somebody else so that we don’t feel like everything was a waste.