MLH HYPE PROSE 1: The Pizza Boy

-- Tonight between the town and the ocean is the black car hunting the wharf, rolling in and out of light like a monster, and the other clichés, like the engine growling and such.

-- The black car is Lee Hunnewell who once had such a girl that the burned CD he found between the seats has him hunting the wharf for drugs.  The songs are about her, to him; to us, without some translation, they have no more meaning than corn flakes, or the planet Neptune.  In this a foolish song holds secret depth: if the music playing on the inside of the car could play outside it, over God's speakers as it would were this the introduction of a movie's hero, you'd hear happy songs pumped dry of meaning; with Treat Me Nice, or Satisfaction, you don't register a man not smoking the same cigarettes as you, nor how Elvis wants not soft, not loving, but pretty fingers run through his hair as if he's watching in a mirror the performance; but in these songs, so emptied out, is great space for little science fictions; cauldrons of secret depth, as when corn flakes equal the kitchen of the home you lived in when your parents were married; as when the planet Neptune is the cluster of baby desks you sat at in third grade when your imagination with all the new facts given it, fluttered and stayed aloft, or shut itself away from the vastness of life for awhile or forever.


-- Even as Lee knows the trail out of heartbreak can be burned on a disc, this twenty-seven minutes of music is an oval race track he's built; he's hurlied, he's burlied, he's all shook up; and there are laps left.  So: to this crevice between the ocean and the town for the alchemy to smooth it out.  For the seventh time since the new year he's getting high on the clock; reminiscing; his is a constipated heart.
-- Lee Hunnewell.  He claims the black car he got in trade for the girl, that it is a spiteful trophy of what all went down, and how now it anchors him to this nighttime postmortem: drugs on the late shift.  It's the story he likes, that he would trade a girl for a car, that his is not a shallow common misogyny, and his sad life how it's since come is kind of romantic with that girl his Capulet girl, and all those lobstermen Capulet, and he a two-card Montague, and finally the car playing like a Transformer, with Mercutio, Rosalind, and the Apothecary uploaded to it's AI.
-- The car holds up to the analogy better than he does: while Lee is soupy-eyed and gray, the car is the pin-up girl to any real man's heart; clean when he is filthy, lean when he is sloppy, strong when he is wheezing.  The car is easily romanticized, whereas Lee is, well, what he is: a drug-addled thirty-something pizza delivery boy; and he didn't trade for the car, he stole the car; he tells people it was a trade, but the girl left him.  
-- And now, as the narrator, I ask you, does this seem the guts of a good book?  Has this taste put pangs in your belly?  A woman wrote a book.  She came to Rockland for fishermen and stoicism, but the story she stole south with was pizza boy and Mopar and soap opera.  
-- There is a character in her book, a pizza boy she describes as having “the lanky charm of a cowardly german shepherd”.  Nice.  She made a name with that.  So consider this - this manifesto - a rewrite of that other book.  You are swimming in new language; corrections must be made before the big event.
-- For Lee, it's gooey noodles, her book; he loved, lost; by lost, traded; by traded, stole; was revenger and reveng'd: all of it now just fluff to villain this dingbat's version of events.  Clichés!  And now the poison's gone paperback, the book reviewers have tired debating the doppelganger the Dingbat did of him, and he’s still here; and not just here, Rockland, but here, the witching hour: six hours after the wharf, here is the black car out front of a high porch house on Broad Street, six pizzas on the back seat to be delivered to the apartment party above, and here is Lee sniffing a caterpillar of moon powder off the Criterion Yojimbo Blu-Ray case; a fool fallen off his own life; narcotic, masturbatory, dirty-hair alone.  Feeding off lies the drugs tell him; no cares when the fishermen upstairs chide him for still fetching their food.  Call it Pizza Boy Alone; the girl called her book, Must Lose Him.