As a younger man I had tremendous powers of persuasion. That’s the only explanation I have as to why my trusting wife Amy allowed me to sell our house in Minneapolis and move us kit and kaboodle to Utah so I could write the Great Mormon Novel back in 1992 -- when we already had six children.
I had been obsessed by this literary willow-the-wisp every since my first ‘real’ job after being blacklisted from Ringling Brothers Circus for brawling with Michu, the World’s Smallest Man. I ended up as news director at radio station KGCX in Williston, North Dakota, with plenty of time on my hands. This was in 1981. So I began a novel on my trusty Olivetti-Underwood portable typewriter. It was called “The Camera Bug,” and it was about a returned LDS missionary on the make for a bride while earning a degree at BYU. A comedy in the classic mold, it ended with the protagonist marrying a beautiful and temple-worthy young lady who loved taking photographs -- hence the title. I meant it as a light-hearted comedy of manners, in the manner of P.G. Wodehouse, and when I showed it to Amy she giggled in all the right places and told me, between makeout sessions on my couch, that I was a pretty good writer. That’s all the encouragement I needed. I applied for and got a small writing grant from BYU, and we spent our honeymoon in Provo getting ready for my undoubtedly imminent academic accolades.
Sadly, the money ran out long before any kind of accolades or degree hove into sight, and there were no more grants to be had. So I shelved the novel and we took off for North Dakota, where I worked in radio again and then went back to work as a circus clown. But I never forgot the fine feeling of coasting along on my typewriter, creating characters and dialogue full-blown as if I were Zeus and the smithy were opening my skull to bring forth Athena. (That’s the kind of overripe stuff my writing was full of back then -- and still is today, come to think of it.)
Ten years into our marriage I’d had enough of sawdust and sorry temp jobs to see us through the winter months when the circus laid off. I had a new idea for the Great Mormon Novel. A biting satire on the cult of supplements and nostrums that LDS women love to dabble in. Over the years I’d noticed time and time again that if you scratched a stalwart LDS lady, you’d find an Amway or Shaklee dealer underneath. Even my beloved, level-headed Amy had succumbed to the blandishments of an MLM scheme involving Melaleuca oil products. I finally convinced her to drop it, but only after we’d been mulcted of several hundred dollars worth of useless inventory purchases. Too bad you couldn’t cook with the damn stuff.
I told Amy that all I needed was time and a typewriter in a quiet corner, and in six months I’d be sure to have a masterpiece that would win a Pulitzer and set us up for life. Instead of boxing my ears for spouting such arrant nonsense, she got the moving van and arranged for us to stay with her sister in Orem -- for the local LDS color and to save on rent -- while I sold our house and put the money (not as much as I’d hoped) in our joint checking account.
Once settled in Orem I scampered into the basement, set up my typewriter, and sailed into my magnum opus with unmitigated enthusiasm. No such thing as writer’s block for me! Each day saw the production of twenty or more pages of sparkling dialogue, compelling plot twists, and ever more engaging characters. As promised, in six months’ time “The Vita-Goodie Lady” was done. It detailed the adventures of a newly wed couple, Brad and Cindy West. He was studying to be an engineer at BYU and his loyal wife Cindy was bound and determined to help pay the bills by consorting with a variety of discombobulated supplement sales schemes, finally settling on the Vita-Goodie Company as her main source of hoped-for income. Needless to say, comedic complications ensue.
Meanwhile Amy’s sister was unsubtly indicating that our carefree days of loafing about her house were drawing to an end. She changed the lock on the front door without telling us. An ugly note appeared in the bathroom Amy and I used, informing us in no uncertain terms that tp cost money and that if we wanted any more we could jolly well buy it ourselves. It was time to move out. Obviously. But first I had to get a hefty advance on my novel.
With breathtaking audacity and even more remarkable naivete, I simply handed the manuscript over to Amy, telling her blithely to find a publisher PDQ -- because, you see, I already had another book swelling up inside me like a bad case of indigestion.
That’s the thing about writing -- once you get going you can’t stop yourself. After finishing “The Vita-Goodie Lady” I couldn’t just sit around twiddling my thumbs -- I had a habit to feed, an obsession to surrender to. So I wrote my clown memoirs, all two-hundred-and-ten pages of them, in a matter of six weeks. Just for something to do, to keep busy, mind you -- I expected nothing from such a minor taradiddle -- which I called “Clown Notes.” Just for a lark I entered “Clown Notes” in the Utah Original Writing Competition under the category of autobiography -- and dang if it didn’t win Honorable Mention and a brunch invite from then Governor Norman H. Bangerter up in Salt Lake. Amy and I enjoyed his company, although neither one of us knew what to make of the skimpy little broiled lamb chops we were served that had white paper cuffs on them.
Amy has always been nothing if not enterprising. When traditional publishers like Deseret Books and Sunstone refused to be overwhelmed by my obvious genius, she took a less traditional route. She got her brother Ben to simply buy the rights to my book outright, for cold, hard, cash. Ben had been at BYU when WordPerfect got its start and was one of its first investors and employees. So he was loaded to the gunwales with the green stuff. He wrote me out a check for a cool 17 thousand dollars. And took ownership of the manuscript. Which he has to this day. And which he never intended to have published by anyone. It was just a tax write off engineered by his accountant, done as a favor to his sister. But I’m not complaining -- that money got us a place of our own and a new van. Once the family was all settled in I went back on the road with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus out of Delano, Florida. I just wasn’t cut out to be a bestselling author. Like the shoemaker in the old proverb, I’d stick to my last.
I did self-publish “Clown Notes,” by the way. Sold about fifty copies over the years, all told. Last time I checked, it was still listed on Amazon.com, under the heading “Out-of-Print: Limited Availability.” I don’t even have a copy of it myself -- most of my manuscripts and personal copies were destroyed by a basement flood years ago.
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