Hey everyone,

Just want to keep you all in the loop. I have my first meeting with a publisher on Friday. For everyone who asked, I'm hoping the timeline to have the books out to all of you is late spring or early summer - but that all depends on the publisher response. So fingers crossed. In the meantime, I'm going to periodically send snippets of the book that got cut out of the final manuscript as a preview.

This was going to be part of Chapter 2. It's about a summer job which I stumbled into because of a girl who lived down the street who just happened to be the first in a long line of women I've disappointed romantically.

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By the summer of 1993, Kristen was sixteen and I was about to be. She’d gone to live with her mother for a couple years, so we hadn’t seen each other much since our failed experiment in middle school romance. Her house was at the very end of the hill that I sprinted up every day to get in shape for baseball season. And one evening as I came blasting up the hill, she stepped onto her dad’s porch to smoke a cigarette.

“Hey,” she smiled, leaning on the railing, puffing away.

“Hey,” I said, striding toward her, hands behind my head, trying to catch my breath from my last sprint. “Where have you been?”

“Where haven’t  I been?” she smiled. This was not the same girl I accidentally ignored for three weeks in middle school. Things were about to get interesting. Right up until they didn’t.

 “Well if it isn’t Kurt,” the voice of her father cackled from the garage. “Geez, you’re tall as an ox now.”

Kristen’s father was the type of grown man who could get away with wearing train engineer hats and saying phrases like ‘fiddle faddle.’ He strode out of the garage wiping grease from a car part with a dirty rag.

“Oh…hey Mister Harper,” I said.

He pointed toward my house. “I seen a new truck in your driveway. What is that, a Dodge?”

“Chevy,” I answered.

Up on the porch, Kristen rolled her eyes. “His name’s Kevin, dad.”

Mr. Harper just nodded. “Chevy huh? What kind of gas mileage you looking at?”

“Uh, it’s my dad’s. I really don’t…”

“Say, you looking for some work this summer? I got a nice little property out in Delmont in need of some TLC.”

I have no idea why I said yes. I was not in fact looking for work that summer. Far from it. I was looking to play baseball and nap. It was most likely because I didn’t want to turn him down in front of his daughter who I was now quite intrigued by. If she liked me four years ago then maybe…

Mr. Harper ducked back into the garage. “Well then I’ll see you at eight o’clock sharp on Monday. Pack a lunch.”

Up on the porch Kristen put out her cigarette. “I always thought you were smarter than that.” And she opened the screen door and headed back inside. She had a boyfriend named David in some other town.

Mister Harper was the landlord at a small four-unit apartment complex and needed someone young and dumb to do the unskilled labor it took to improve the place enough to justify jacking up the rent. He offered me five bucks an hour under the table. In a typical day I made thirty-five or forty bucks. At the time, it seemed like an absolutely unreal amount of money.

As far as jobs go, it wasn’t all that hard. I peeled up floor tile, cleaned out the garages, painted the walls, did landscaping, caulking, patch work, and a bunch of other stuff that even an untrained teenager could do with minimal supervision. The only day I really remember was one I spent stripping varnish from all the kitchen cabinets with some insane pink shit that had a warning on the can that said, “Caution: Exposure to this Product has Caused Cancer in Certain Laboratory Animals.” After five hours of breathing in the fumes with only a small window open above the sink, I started wishing they’d have been a bit less vague about the animals in question. I needed more information. If the warning had said, “Exposure to this Product has Caused Cancer in Certain Laboratory Animals: Mainly Goats,” I’d have been a lot less concerned. My worry was that they were trying to hide the effects the gnarly stuff had on primates like me. Suddenly my head was filled with villainous scientists.

“Ah, Doctor Sanders. Is that the varnish stripper report I see in your hand?”

“Yes it is. Everything went well - except all of the monkeys got cancer.”

“Monkeys, huh? Not the mice or the ferrets?”

“Oh no, they got cancer as well. Loads of it. It’s just that well…monkeys are similar enough to humans that I thought I shouldn’t bury the lead.”

“That’s going to hurt sales. Especially with customers that believe in evolution. Is there a way to warn people about the dangers without actually giving them any useful information?”

“We’ll look into it.”

In the end I figured I wasn’t a laboratory animal, so I’d probably be fine. I did, however, decide right then and there to quit reading backs of cans.