It was Doug Coupland, author of Generation X and so many other good books, who told me about hotel armoires. In the days before flat-screen televisions, hotel televisions were hidden inside fake armoires. It was such a hotel cliché that my agent once told me that “armoire” was the French word for “place to hide the television.” Coupland clued me in to their other secret purpose. The cabinets never reach the ceiling, but they’re too tall for most hotel maids to bother cleaning the tops. Consequently, every author on tour, given manuscripts and self-published memoirs and anything too big or too heavy to lug inside a suitcase for the next few weeks, all these well-intentioned gifts, the writer leaves them hidden on top of the room’s armoire. A kinder fate than putting them in the trash.
At Coupland’s urging, I started to check atop armoires. Coated with dust, there they were. Expensive art books. Hand-knit sweaters. Beautiful things inscribed to the most famous names in literature, abandoned to the Sargasso Sea of book tours. Like the cobwebbed contents of a pharaoh’s tomb.
Other times, the Last Man in Line delivers something less innocuous.
In Portland, as the line ended at the First Congregationalist Church, a young man stepped up and began to deal out Polaroid pictures. He tossed them down on the table in front of me, mostly pictures of old men sleeping. Some were women, young but haggard. They all posed, eyes closed, slumped sideways with their heads pressed against white-painted plywood. He explained that he worked at a popular adult bookstore. They kept a Polaroid camera ready to snap pictures of people they’d ban from the premises. As an example, he tossed down a Polaroid of a smiling thirty-something man wearing a windbreaker. Written in Sharpie below his smile was THE TASTER.
The Taster looked like half the software engineers and game designers I knew. He could’ve been my letter carrier or a branch manager at a bank.
He was banned, the Last Man explained, because the clerks were always finding him on his hands and knees licking the floor in the porn arcade.
Kid…don’t say that I didn’t warn you.
I asked, “But what about these sleeping people?” Referring to the old men and young women slumped with their eyes closed.
“They’re not asleep,” the Last Man in Line told me. “At shift change, we have to go back and check all the movie booths in the arcade, and when I find them I take their picture.” He added, “Before I call an ambulance.”
On closer inspection, they looked pale. Their faces hung slack. The white plywood was a wall or partition they’d fallen sideways against.
He said, “They’re dead.” Old men who’d suffered heart attacks or strokes while masturbating. Or they were female sex workers who’d sat in a porn booth to shoot up and had overdosed. There were so many that he’d begun to arrange them in rows across the long table. A gallery in Los Angeles had invited him to hang them in a show, he told me with pride. Arranged on the wall in a single eye-level row, they’d soon encircle a gallery space.
Tours and tours after that night I spoke at a Chapters bookstore in Toronto. I told about the Polaroids, and a young woman in the crowd shouted out, “Is that the Fantasy store at Northeast Sandy and 32nd?” It was. To the delight of everyone, she shouted, “I know that guy. I was the jism swabber there!” She was Canadian, she’d explained, working off the books, and it was the only job she could find.
In our incredible shrinking world. For the rest of my life, I’ll close my eyes and still see those dead faces.
In San Francisco, the Last Man trailed the line onto the stage at the Castro Theatre. A blond man in a business suit, he seemed so normal. Then he wasn’t. His junk was out. He hadn’t just opened his fly and hauled it out. In the short time it took me to meet the person before him and sign a book, the Last Man whipped off his clothes, from shoes to necktie. Naked, he berated me, “You think you’re so outlandish? Well, autograph this!”
And he flopped his pale, pink tackle on the table.
The Truman Capote story flashed in my head: No, but I could initial it…Still, the smile of The Taster is never totally forgotten, and I’d gone skittish. A bookseller once told me of a reader asking for a kiss from the actor Alan Cumming on his tour. The kiss established a precedent like Stephen King’s smeared blood, and Cumming had ended up kissing hundreds of readers that night.
I could see this penis going on Instagram, signed by me. Skin is ridiculously difficult to write on, even more so when it’s loose, wrinkled penis skin. People forget that writing books is my job, not autographing thousands of penises. I politely declined.
Nothing could’ve made this Last Man happier. He snapped, “I knew you were a phony.” His parting shot.
Which leads us to East Lansing, Michigan, and three high school kids who waited until the book signing line came to an end at one in the morning. My flight out of Detroit
