Chapter 11
While John and Dr. Sharon Sloan ASFKA where confabbing on the phone about Sharon’s life choices, Mrs. Heartbreak was finishing up her (successful) transaction with the boys at Vintage Cargo in Eureka Springs. She got back into her White Chevy Van and pointed its blunt nose in the direction of Berryville.
Like most Yankees, the Heartbreaks visited the Ozarks a few times before deciding to move there. Their early decision was to live out by Beaver Lake, but when Mrs. Heartbreak decided to open a bookstore she targeted Eureka Springs as the best venue for such an enterprise.
John was less sure. As a Middleclass Twit, he was bemused by Eureka Springs’ seventeen hour city council meetings, by the prevalence of Elderly Trust Fund Babies, Hippies, and Full of Rage Divorcees in the “business” community, and by the sheer number of Scoffers and Blasphemers dedicated to Total Slack, Mockery Science, Sadofuturistics, Megaphysics, Scatalography, Schizophreniatrics, Morealism, Sarcastrophy, Cynisacreligion, Apocolyptionomy, ESPectorationalism, Hypno-Pediatrics, Subliminalism, Satyriology, Disto-Utopianity, Sardonicology, Fascetiouism, Ridiculophagy, and Miscellatheistic Theology.
John wasn’t sure that he would fit in.
He was quite sure that Mrs. Heartbreak would not fit in. If the Heartbreaks “were” transportation, Mrs. Heartbreak would be high speed rail, an inorganic compulsion on two rails following an exactly pre-established course, and John would be a 1953 Studebaker used on an occasional basis—perhaps to celebrate National Holidays, Geezer Fests, and as the Price of Admission to the ‘I’m too tight to buy a real car’ Club. This is all by way of saying that Mrs. Heartbreak is a Social Order Theorist who believes that the world operates in rational and predictable ways. No, Eureka Springs was not for her.
And while Studebaker John is, as an adherent of Chaos Theory, prone to aimlessness and a sort of organic submersion into ‘whatever’, he is a more or less reliable human being in so far as reliability has any meaning in the Twenty-First Century. So no, he wouldn’t fit in either.
That’s why Mrs. Heartbreak’s White Chevy Van is headed toward Berryville, instead of to Eureka Springs, and not the other way around.
There are other places in the Ozarks to live, of course, like Holiday Island, or Green Forest, a skip of a town eight miles east of Berryville and 16 miles further east from Eureka Springs. Green Forest has the Country Rooster Restaurant, run by the entirely admirable Willa Kerby to recommend it, and it was the girlhood home of Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and editor of ‘Cosmopolitan Magazine’. If you ever get to Green Forest, though, you will quickly realize that, as Brown’s Hometown, Green Forest is as purely accidental as Bill Clinton telling the truth or George W. Bush knowing the truth. Consequently or subsequently or simply therefore, John had ruled out Green Forest; there just isn’t, as Gertrude Stein commented after a short visit in 1921, any there there.
Holiday Island had briefly been in the running. John appreciated its lawn care ethic and the orderliness of its streets and public buildings. Somehow, however, its developer had managed to plop a suburb down in the middle of a nice stand of trees and, while attractive and orderly, it is still a suburb, only filled with old people who act like they are back in High School. John assumes that a hot date in Holiday Island is a prostate massage and, as appealing as that may be, it wasn’t exactly, in John’s mind, Prom Night. And thusly, Holiday Island missed out too. (Ho ho)
[Author’s note: I suppose I’ve lost the HI market. Crap]
As you can see, at least if your mind is as clear and bright as my mind is, that Berryville became the winner by default. Whether Berryville feels itself a winner is not known but, in any case, the Heartbreak’s poured their fortune into it, and Mrs. Heartbreak opened ‘Heartbreak’s Pretty Good Books and Really Dreadful Coffee’. You may read about this enterprise and Mrs. Heartbreak’s management of it, in the thrilling novel Coffee with John Heartbreak: a Mostly True Story of Berryville, Arkansas, available at Amazon.com (naturally).
Mrs. Heartbreak took to Berryville like a duck to water. Yes, I have surely missed the opportunity to invent a more interesting and creative metaphor than that tired old phrase, but none would be as exact or as clearly understood. And be mindful, please that I am trying to keep things at around the 8th Grade reading level, a difficult thing when you throw around terms like ‘Social Order Theorist.’ Anyway…
…like a duck to water did Mrs. Heartbreak take to Berryville. Quickly, she became President of the Merchants’ Association and a Progressive Business Voice. ‘Heartbreak’s’ was a success: tourists on their way to Eureka Springs, residents of Eureka Springs, and three citizens from Berryville, made the Heartbreak’s shop a regular stop. Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill had written, and the Heartbreaks grew rich in wisdom.
And so it is that Mrs. Heartbreak is traveling back to Berryville, talking with her mother Mrs. Hermione Rustingnuts of Far Tortuga, Indiana, on her cell phone, unaware that her husband and Sharon Sloan are similarly engaged, but in plotting out strategies to effect a Cosmic Change in the modus operandi of a $Televangelism & Time Share Empire$.
“And did you know,” Sharon said, “That there isn’t a single mention of Tomi Raye on the Eveningside website? Isn’t that odd?”
“Do you mean that Tomi has been erased?” John asked. “That’s odd. Although entirely understandable.”
“I find that ungallant, John.”
“But understandable.”
“I’m just saying,” Sharon explained. “Tomi Raye was the real star of ‘The Jake & Tomi Show.’ You’d think the Little Whizzer would at least acknowledge her, like maybe naming a street in Eveningside after her.”
“They have streets in Eveningside?” John asked, incredulously. “My goodness.”
“John, you don’t seem to understand the scope of the operation,” she said. “They have streets, apartment buildings, condos, a police department, shops, and get this, a ‘Lulu Lane’ gift store named after the current squeeze.”
“Wow. What do we know about the new Tomi Raye?”
“Not much. She’s the author of a book that describes her fall into drug addiction, adultery, abortions, and her conversion to Christianity. I haven’t read the book.
“Oh. She and Jake have adopted nine kids. That’s it. That’s all I know.”
John nodded thoughtfully. “I’m not surprised that she’s written a book,” he said. “Lots of people write books who have never actually read one. But I am surprised by the adoptions.”
“Why?” Sharon asked. “Isn’t adoption a thing good people do? And isn’t it a thing that people who are trying to prove they’re good would do?”
“That part I get,” John said. “What I don’t get is what kind of adoption agency lets a 70 year old divorced ex-convict who owes the IRS $6,000,000—and his former drug addict wife—adopt nine kids?”
Dr. Sloan was at a loss for words. “Gosh,” she said, finally. “It’s a miracle! What if Jake is on the level! OMG!”
John nodded. “I considered that,” he said. “Great scoundrels have reformed and committed themselves to new lives, new realities, and new ways of behaving. Perhaps it is the case with Reverend Cooker and the Lovely Lulu.
“One never knows, do one?” he finished.
“Do you think that? That he’s on the level?”
“Probably not,” John replied. “I hardly think that Fiacre would charge us with the alternative unless he had good reason. I’m sure that didn’t come to Berryville just to garden with me, Mrs. Hudspeth, and young Kari Keever. He’s convinced that Cooker is up to no good.
“But,” he continued, “This is America and one is innocent until proven otherwise. We travel to Blue Eye with an open mind.”
“What about my money?” Dr. Sloan asked. “Or, are you still hung up on all that ‘Warrior Queen’ stuff?”
John was about to answer when he heard a rumble on his driveway. “I have to go,” he said. “I believe Mrs. Heartbreak has returned. “
