The Epilogue (#12 of the Pride Series)

The final part and epilogue of ‘Pride, More Pride and Quite a Lot of Extreme Prejudice’

“Fuck it, you can’t do this,” Marcie said, flinging my pages across the table. “I, like, love you, your stuff, but… Jesus… Fuck!”
She always had a negative first reaction to my wilder ideas. Usually, she came around, but no before an ‘F’ fest of gigantic proportions. Usually, I had the advantage of talking to her over email, Instant Messenger, or – if absolutely necessary- the telephone. Here my American agent and I were face to face, and she was swearing at me… loudly, not because she was shouting, but just because she was loud.
People on adjoining tables were starting to stare. We were eating at a pavement café just off Covent Garden. The place itself was very monochrome and very French, apart from the London taxis and buses gas-guzzling their way at five miles an hour past our table. Their noise was not quite enough to drown her profanity. She lowered her voice.
“Look, I sold your last book, but… I mean, you’re talking about my homeland. Nobody’s going to be happy reading about a President losing track of his John Thomas department. That’s, like, the worst kind of un-American. We set up committees to investigate that sort of thing.”
Given the attack on every single value or institutions the Western World holds dear, a one-balled President seemed a strange thing to get fixated on.
“It’s satirical,” I said.
“It’s suicide,” she said. “It doesn’t even make sense. He wakes up and his balls have… what? Just disappeared?”
“There’s a mystery theme to it,” I suggested. “And besides, it’s just the one, not both.”
“Oh, Christ! That makes me feel better.”
“You told me to court controversy. You said I’d sell more.”
She shook her head and smiled. “Reparations?” she said. “’It is a dream to bring back to the least privileged in our society that which was so cruelly taken from them. Plymouth Rock is not a confectionary, and you cannot eat it, even when it lands upon your head,’ as Malcolm X said. Are you fucking kidding me?”
She had a Russian fur hat perched on top, which seemed odd, because a) it was a beautiful spring day and whilst it wasn’t California, it wasn’t Siberia either, and b) not even a wisp of hair was showing anywhere.
Gathering myself, I tried to rationalize my literary position. “I thought, you know, with Obama being on his way out now, I could do a story about him not being there, a kind of alternate reality. Then we can look back in four years and see whether it’s turned out like I say.”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, “whatever happens, we’ll still have a President with cojones in the plural come 2020. Even if it is Clinton II.”
A waiter in a stripy top interrupted the conversation. He stood expectantly, pad and pen in hand, hoping to take our order.
Marcie smiled, dropped into a calmer register and began a five-minute explanation of exactly what she wanted and how she wanted it. She was only ordering vegetable crudités, but specific crudités, in a specific size and order.
Of course, her visits to these shores were infrequent and relatively brief. She hadn’t cottoned on that food in British restaurants comes as it comes. You can’t rewrite the menu on a whim. I noticed that the waiter was taking nothing down after the second minute and settled for ordering a Caesar salad without trying to specify anything optional.
The waiter went away, head bowed. I couldn’t figure out why Marcie was so fussy. She was thin as a stick and with her fur hat, she looked a lot like a Q-tip dipped in ink. She never ate more than half a mouthful of anything she ordered, or so she said. In her past life as a model, she claimed to have not-eaten in some of the world’s finest eateries. Perhaps she just liked the pattern food made on the plate.
While I pondered the issue, Marcie stared at me across the table. Without warning, she said, “I could live with him being a cockroach.”
I nearly choked on the mouthful of bread roll I’d just bitten off.
“Then you’re, like, aping a great grotesque image from the classics,” she explained. “Kafka’s Metamorphosis. There’s no undertone about sexual potency. And if you get, like, banned in fifty-three States, we say it’s art. It worked for that guy who cuts up animals with a chainsaw. The religious freaks burn copies, the Aryan Brotherhood sends you death threats and, if we’re lucky, we get a murmur of protest out of Washington. Kerr-Ching!!”
“I can’t write seventy thousand words about a Presidential cockroach that doesn’t speak. Dialogue would be difficult.”
“Kafka did it.”
“Kafka was a genius, OK, besides which his cockroach didn’t have to command the free world.”
“Point taken,” she said. She regrouped. “I liked the Yeses, though.”
“Thank you… good,” I said.
“How about if you started him out with three?”
“He’s already got three yeses, Marcie, didn’t you read it?.”
“No, three balls. I’m thinking out of the box here. I’m trying to save you. Publishers want the opening chapters pronto and I can’t send this out the way it is.”
“Thank you,” I said again without really meaning it.
“A spare, you know,” she persisted. “Do the math – three minus one. He’d still have an appropriate number for presidential office. All those implications about un-American impotency go away.”
I couldn’t fault her logic.
“Think about it,” she urged.
“I will,” I promised.