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About A Book
There is a guy that I knew years ago. He was the best friend of an old friend’s boyfriend, and I met him a few times at parties, and he always stuck out in my memory, quite possibly because he is literally the most insanely, ridiculously attractive man I have ever seen in actual, human life. Looking directly at him was next to impossible for me, like staring into the sun during an eclipse on the sexiest day of the year. Take young Paul Newman, multiply him by whatever guy you think is the hottest (probably young Paul Newman), take that result and raise it to the millionth power. Then, put that total in front of the laser they used in “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”, set it to, “Reverse” and now fire. That end result almost, almost comes close to approximating how hot he looks now.
He makes me feel like Sandra from 227.
I hadn’t thought of him in years, but the other day, caught, stoned down a Facebook rabbit hole, clicking through peoples mutual friends, suddenly, there he was.
Believe it or not, this post isn’t about a man so handsome that if I put a picture here that I obtained, say, by taking a screenshot from his Facebook profile and saving it to my desktop, which I would never do because that’s crazy , you’d all freak out and put spikes through your eyes, wanting so badly for it to be the last image you ever see.
No, this isn’t about him. This is about the only thing that’s ever been better than hotness: hilariousness.
Contained within this young man’s Profile Pictures album, amongst smoldering shots of him looking sexy in a t shirt astride a bike, on vacation with his whippet-thin girlfriend, or standing plaid-clad and stubbly in front of a barn was this:
Yeah. For real. The Boy Who Drank Too Much, by Shep Greene.
Thank you world, for your abundance.
Everything about this cover is so perfect, so ridiculously ripe for parody that I was sure it was fake. A quick search on Amazon proved that it was as real as Follow My Leader, a book with a similarly hilarious cover that I had been assigned to read in grade school, about a kid who explodes his eyes out with a firecracker and then has to rely upon the wits of his seeing eye dog who ultimately becomes his truest friend in this world.
Here we’ve got the two kids, who are clearly Canadian by the look of things, ready to take to the ice, but one of them has chosen this moment to crack a beer. After the game, sure, but before? Actually, watching no more than 8 minutes of a Philadelphia Flyers game might lead you to believe that that is the way the pro’ do it, but no matter: the title of the book lets us know that this particular boy drinks too much. There is, of course, an appropriate amount of alcohol for schoolboys to consume, but this is just crazy. If only this boy could be more like his friends “The Boy Who Drank in Moderation” or “The Boy Who Drank at Parties on Weekends, but Still Kept Up With His Schoolwork”.
Right about now you’re probably thinking what I was thinking, which is that there is no way in the world that this book’s contents could possibly be as awesome as its cover.
Sure, I could have simply run out to the library, or built a time machine and gone back to the year it was published (1980, year of my birth), but instead I decided to get the zeitgeist response, by referring to that never-wrong, intellectually nimble, grassroots cultural think-tank known as “the Amazon reviews.”
Okay. A little pat, but fine; a nice summary. Still, I had questions: what about pacing, tempo, readability? Does it engage?
Fast-paced, stirring plot and apparently, a practical tome for living; a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress for the alcoholically-inclined pre-teenager within.
Eh, really? I can’t say I know how wise it would be to give a 55-year-old, drink-hardened, thrice-divorced alcoholic in a state-enforced rehabilitation center this book to read, but then again, I am not a substance abuse counselor. Maybe in Canada!
This is, perhaps, the book’s most damning review. It traffics in the hard truths and it certainly knows its audience. I admit that at first blush, I did think that The Boy Who Drank Too Much probably “isn’t that great”. It was an opinion based on prejudice, and I’m owning to that. However, I must also confess that at this time, my state of mind hasn’t changed.
What of the writing? I still don’t have a clue what the narrative structure is like, or a single fact about the author’s style, so making a value judgment at this time remains impossible.
Touche.
Bless your heart, Amazon Reviewer “aaaaaahhhaha” from Michigan.
I know wherever he is, Shep Greene blesses it, too.
