Alberta Clipper

Leo Gray works in a North Carolina toll booth, where he happily reads the world’s great The World’s Great Thinkers—Rousseau’s Contract, Hegel’s History, Marx’s Manifesto; Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche—the Transcendentalists, the French poets, the Modernists, and the Beats. Everything is dandy. . . . But then his social worker girlfriend convinces him to turn upwardly mobile, and Leo gets a job writing for a weekly newspaper on the coast of his home state Georgia. Sounds great, right? But his two bosses are named, ahem, Big Dick and Little Dick Taylor. And his girlfriend refuses to relocate with him, since she’s taken on another down-and-out lover, “a stroke victim in his sixties struggling to relearn the alphabet.” In hopes of transforming yet another loser? Leo wonders.

This novel offers an unusual comic take of a man on the skids, a wildly sardonic ride that teeters on a great deal of darkness but manages to pull through in a fashion worthy of any smiling anti-hero who alternately fights himself and the surrounding ring-a-ding complacency.

Oyster shells covered the parking lot, and palm trees bordered the doors; gold calligraphy centered on the doors read: “Coastal Georgia Sun, OUR family dedicated to yours.” I wondered if anyone saw me through the blackened glass. I wondered if my nervousness was noticeable. Wondered this too often. It made me nervous. Went in anyway. Inside, three old ladies sat in the dusky light beneath an “Advertising” sign. They didn’t seem to notice me. Noticed then that I often went unnoticed, and that I didn’t mind it. Smelled their hairspray mixing with mildewed newspapers and wet ink. Three Teddy Roosevelt look-alikes hung in picture frames from faded paneling. Someone in the distance smoked a cigar. A lady in advertising said, “I like mine on a bed of rice.”
    Descended the wooden staircase in the corner, and landed in a basement. A single fluorescent light fixture hung from chains in the center of the room and jaundiced every face and piece of furniture. An elderly woman slouched at the nearest desk, gray eyes swimming in opposite directions behind thick bifocals. To my right, four desks faced a urine-colored wall, three of them occupied by good-postured workers: an energetic man in his early twenties, a stout man in his fifties, and a hyper woman in her forties. They talked too loudly into their phones and typed too quickly on their keyboards. Certificates hung above their desks. Above the hyper woman’s desk was taped this bumper sticker: “Have you prayed for a law officer today?”
    Stood in the center of the room, put my hands in my pockets and pulled them out again. No one noticed. Eased toward an office in the corner, kept my feet outside and stuck my head inside. A small man sat on a pillow, drawing squares and rectangles on a piece of paper. Didn’t know what to say, or the tone to use, or when to interrupt, so I cleared my throat.
    He raised a pair of small red eyes to me, staring intently for several seconds...

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