joeldeutsch.net

by

Joel Deutsch

Copyright © Joel M. Deutsch 2010

DEDICATION

to my dear friend Yana

For the great relief of having you to talk to

(Tip of the hat to John Sebastian and The Lovin’ Spoonful)

Chapter 1

Wide-eyed, wired with insomnia, Daniel Silver barreled down the nearly empty 2 A.M Santa Monica Freeway in his jet-black Camaro at nearly 90 miles per hour until he had to slow down for the gentle curve of the McClure Tunnel, which spat him out onto the Pacific Coast Highway, headed north. He cruised up the PCH at a more moderate, if still illegal, 70.
The sudden, salty chill of an onshore breeze through the open driver’s side window raised Goosebumps on his bare left arm; all he was wearing was the faded blue pocket T he’d pulled on for bed, a pair of old khaki Dockers shorts, and sockless sneakers.
Folded uselessly on the other front seat lay A white sweatshirt whose chest was emblazoned in angular black lettering with the call letters and the FM frequency of the local NPR station to which he’d recently subscribed by phone during an on-aire pledge drive, giving someone his VISA card account number. The sweatshirt wasn’t much use to him Of course, just lying there, but still Daniel had to congratulate himself for at least remembering to bring it, considering the discombulated state of mind he’d been in lately.
He’d subscribed to the station just to have someone to talk to on his lunch break one particularly lonely day. And just to have something bigger than himself but smaller and nearer than the Law, or the Bar, or America, or the Democratic party or the ACLU to feel himself part of, after more than 20 years of marriage, recently dissolved by mutual, although not entirely rancorless , consent. Before they’d gotten themselves lawyered up, while they’d still been talking, there’d been a lot of you should haves, you nevers, and you always. Now, waiting for the divorce to be finalized, it was down to just phone calls with their respective attorneys.
Daniel scanned the radio dial, sampling each station for a second or two: off-key earnest alt rock singer-songwriters, classics war horses, house music like disco nightmare flashbacks, ranting talk-show hosts, Spanish-language stations whose hosts’ rapid-fire monologues went over Daniel’s head and sounded as manic as futbol commentary, and Golden Oldies programs that made him feel as if he were locked inside a laundromat. He punched off the radio.
In the changer he’d had installed in the Camaro’s trunk the first week after buying the car, there was a small library of good CDs: Glenn Gould’s second recording of the Bach Goldberg Variations, plenty of Mozart, plenty of Coltrane, a few choice Grateful Dead albums and much more.
But, right then, what appealed to Daniel the most was high-speed silence, a chance to think nothing but his own thoughts, a capella ,as he skimmed the Western edge of America, the Pacific Ocean lapping at sand on his left, rock walls looming up on his right.
He thumbed a rocker switch near the door handle and his window glided up , but still he could hear the throb and rumble of the car’s powerhouse V8 if he only just nudged the gas pedal the tiniest bit.
Sometimes Daniel wished he’d bought something a little more subtle to replace his staid-looking, aging Lexus when he’d had a vague intimation of change coming over him, earlier in the year.
Maybe it was just the proliferating birthday candles and general mid-life malaise. Or maybe there had been more marital discontents and apprehensions than he knew, or wanted to know.
If macho and predatory, neither of which he really was, was what he was going for, he could have bought one of those behemoth Subs that loomed up in your rearview on the San Diego Freeway like a tank, and still looked tough.
But no, he had to get a fucking Camaro. From a fucking cop, no less. A kid he knew from Traffic court who had three young children and couldn’t keep driving a sporty gas guzzler with a cramped back seat.
Benny silver, Daniel’s father, C.E.O. and, before that, top sales manager of West Coast Sportswear, had known a thing or two about car choices and image, himself.
“Let’s say you’re on a sales call,” Benny had explained to his son enough times for Daniel to have memorized the riff, “and your customer catches you pulling up in a Chevy Bel Air. What does the man see, is what you have to ask yourself. A prudent businessman?No sirree, bub. Not on your life. What he sees is a fella who’s not making the grade. A Pontiac, same thing, except then what he sees is an immature loser who’s shelled out a few bucks extra trying to look sporty. To make the best impression, you’ve got to move up to the right step in your product line, which in this case is the entire General Motors family of automobiles.
“Of course,” went Benny’s usual caveat, “you don’t want to go overboard. Let’s say for some reason your customer is having a bad day, and he looks out his office window, and there you are, driving onto his lot in a snazzy new Fleetwood or a Coupe de Ville. Does he think you must have something on the ball because you’re in a Caddy? That you must be a good, honest, successful businessman, the kind who inspires confidence?
Not a chance. What he sees is a sharp Jew with a swelled head coming to yank the wool over his eyes, and he’s not gonna let that happen, no matter what kinda deal you’re prepared to offer him. No matter what you do when you get into his office. Not even if you give him a whole box of Garcia y Vegas plus a bottle of Canadian Club, to boot. Doesn’t matter. You’ve already lost him. That’s why I went with the Buick. Buick says solid, it says dependable, it says you’re doing well enough, thank you very much, and that’s that.”
It was the Friday night, now Saturday morning, of Labor Day weekend. Back in West Hollywood, the heat wasn’t as oppressive as early September could be, but it wasn’t cooling off very much in Daniel’s third floor apartment, either. So, sleepless. So, the road trip.
From time to time, headlights or taillights swept by in one direction or the other like fast, luminescent fish. The speed felt good.
But just as he got to Malibu, he had to pump the brakes and come to a complete stop. Sideways across his lane is parked a California Highway patrol cruiser, its light bar flashing and a uniformed cop standing there with his hand raised, palm outward. Behind the cruiser, a procession of luxury sedans and high-end SUVs with a couple of stretch limos thrown in is emerging from the parking lot of a lavish ocean view restaurant. They bounce gently out of the driveway, some going south and some going the opposite way,protected for their left turns by another Highway Patrol cruiser holding back southbound traffic.
Daniel tried to spot familiar faces, but there were too many rolled-up smoked glass windows. . One thing he couldn’t help noticing, though, were the reflective red, white and blue stickers on the front or rear bumpers, or on both, of each and every vehicle. FREE BOBBY BAIL, the stickers proclaimed.
After the restaurant’s driveway disgorged the last of the revelers and the two CHP cruisers shut off their top lights and sped away, Daniel surprised himself. He’d made this middle of the night road trip before, and Malibu is where he’d always turned around and driven back home. But tonight, for some reason, he stayed on the PCH until it fed into U.S. 101 and just kept driving, rolling ahead through the dark
ness and thinking about Bobby Bail.

Los Angeles attorney Daniel Silver, newly divorced and without a clue about being a middle-aged bachelor, sets off in The Book of Danny, approx. 58,000 words, on a brave, befuddling search for the kind of love that will provide him tender sustenance and enable a new life of quality and meaning.

Along our irreverent way, we encounter a broad range of vivid characters: A retired dwarf Mexican lucha libre wrestler, a homeless street drunk, a charming and sometimes eloquent Chasidic rebbe, a perplexing bi-polar man who suffers from post-polio syndrome and occasionally poses as a paraplegic Viet Nam vet, a Bernie Madoff-like character who’s a high school friend of Daniels’, once idealistic but now madly acquisitive, and a pair of amusing and sinister Elvis-loving twins who are attempting to carry out their own jihad against the American Muslim community as well as White Power types and whose activities bring on a full-scale LAPDraid on a popular delicatessen. We see the legendary, catastrophic 2001 Daytona 500 NASCAR race. We learn how to ritually don the Jewish Orthodox phylacteries called tefillin. But most dramatically of all, we enter with Daniel the subculture of post-Soviet Russian immigrants, and watch with bated breath as Daniel falls in love with a single mother named Irina, a gifted photographer, and begins to see the light at the end of his post-marital tunnel.

I graduated San Francisco State University with a BA in English/Creative Writing and an award from the Academy of American Poets. I have worked mostly as a business writer and free-lance journalist. A series of my essays in the Los Angeles Times Magazine describe low-vision misadventures and ruminate on the experience of going blind from a genetically-caused retinal degeneration. The Book of Danny is my first novel.

Thank you for your time and consideration. This query is a multiple submission. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Manuscript available upon request.

A thought about the brevity of this mss: This novel may not be The Great Gatsby, but word count on Gatsby, by comparison, is only 5,061.

Sincerely,

Joel M. Deutsch
Los Angeles
Please use contact e-maial link on site to get in touch with me,