Hill American Hill (THE SOCIAL HILL SERIES, #3)

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-386-92937-6
Verlag: Jason Hill
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 211 Seiten

American Hill is the third and last installment in The Social Hill Series by Jason Hill. Following the adventures of Tony after he loses his family, we find him now in a new place with a new love. Still, all is not ideal...he faces legal troubles and continued hardship. His children, back in Texas, no longer talk to him but will end up needing him as their mother falls into jeopardy. Will Tony be able to rescue them and still be able to accomplish his goal of becoming a famous author?

Told in the author's unmistakeable style, American Hill is a humorous, romantic tale that will have you mesmerized from start to finish.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hill, Jason

Leseproben

MY YELLOW BRICK ROAD was a ramshackle splintered-up room with nails sticking up out of the floorboards on the third floor of an old brownstone in the City of Brotherly Love. Inside though, I was as happy as if Kennedy had made it back to Washington. Since my arrival in South Jersey three months before from San Antonio, Texas—with the help of my trusty blue 2005 Chevy Cavalier, whose hundreds of thousands of miles were to me not a detriment but a badge of honor—I had called my automobile my home most of the time. The roof over my head was a twelve-year-old American sports car. Along with the occasional Airbnb property in different boroughs of the Garden State, when my pocketbook would allow it. I make it sound worse than it was, though. There was Danusha, after all. Oh, and how green was her Garden...State! (Of which I was still an interloper, because my fugitive status made me fear walking into a DMV like George Jefferson and applying for valid state identification). Within, I was overwhelmed by the abundance of foliage. Everywhere I drove—especially during my therapeutic trips up and down the 295 in my first weeks there—dense, thick trees dotted the landscape. Coming from the sun-bleached landscapes of central Texas had not prepared me for this surplus of Nature. My commentary is not a criticism, however. I greeted the change of seasons with joy and the drop in temperature without complaint. I felt New Jersey, the same state I’d heard so many grumbles about before I got here, had a lot to offer me. The world was rich, and I was intent on getting my share. ?    Long Distance Lover was happy our relations were now in person. Among other things. Our correspondences on Messenger in the months leading up to my arrival could have filled a Library of Congress. After making the 2000-mile drive to relocate my life somewhere in her proximity and escape my dead-end previous existence in the city that lost the Alamo, I relished my new environs. Ahh, the Wawa convenience stores. Ohh, the full service gas stations. Then the biggest surprise. The pleasures of the flesh. I knew the sexual adventures of the geriatric set were grossly underreported, but never—until now—had I been the object of its appetites. “Careful,” she had memorably told me before my trip, “my bones are crunchy.” The bronze, moldy crucifix in her blind husband’s bedroom was awaiting me on the wall above his mattress. I knew this romance would be many things, but conventional was not one of them. Upon my arrival in Collingswood, I was stuck on my lover like glue. I really didn’t have much of a choice. To me, South Jersey might as well have been Zimbabwe. Or Beirut. Yet I liked the way, if you walked down the White Horse Pike in either direction for about half an hour, you could end up passing through three or four different small towns or municipalities. I found that aspect charming. As I did the door handles on the refrigerator of the fourth-floor apartment she shared with her blind husband, which looked straight out of Richie Cunningham’s Happy Days kitchen. The moment you figure how the day will go, you’re driving east through Tennessee. It’s June, that month of new marriages and runaway brides. Wind judders over the windshield from the treetops and summer air made even more oppressive by the abundance of asphalt and global warming—thank you, mankind—fills your lungs like the butane from a hot air balloon. Thirty hours earlier you fled probation in San Antonio, seated in the driver’s seat of a car that once belonged to your best friend’s lesbian daughter, its passenger side smashed in just above the rear wheel near the gas tank. It’s only cosmetic; besides that one obvious flaw, the car rides good for its age. Now as you cruise the streets of South Jersey your radio blasts “The Steve Harvey Morning Show” every weekday, and the toiletries and crumpled beer cans in the backseat jostle against each other over every pothole. The plan: stalk every independent bookstore, every library, every doghouse, henhouse, outhouse, storehouse, and townhouse within a one-hundred-mile radius and hawk your book, which you self-published, until something turns up, because sooner or later something always turns up—it’s a game of numbers, it’s the law of averages, and you will write your way into a better standard of living, you who have always styled yourself an architect of words. My 2005 Cavalier jitterbugs over potholes and manhole covers, and the beefy boys in blue hide behind shrubbery in steroid-injected patrol cars waiting for some unsuspecting speed demon. Every so often, in the rearview, I glimpse a cop behind me. I pump the brakes, not too hard, just enough to keep my black ass from having to see flashing lights come on. You know if you get pulled over and the cop sees you’re fleeing probation in another state, your ass is goin’ in iron bracelets faster than a jackrabbit gets fucked. Thus, with awareness, you stay under the speed limit on every street you turn on, trying not to draw too much attention. You plan to lay low during the hot summer ahead and write this sequel to your first book—a novel that garnered you a small but loyal following, mostly women of Caucasian persuasion, that got you noticed by people who ordinarily wouldn’t have given you the time of day, that even got you the companion you call your girlfriend now. Your plan is not to leave this town until you’re rich, get your kids back, land on the New York Times bestseller list, get out of this mess. You plan to quit being your own worst enemy. I didn’t know it, but those ruby slippers were with me all along. ?    “Age is no importance unless you are a cheese, darling,” my girlfriend, Danusha, is saying. I am driving, with her beside me, her legs—the left of which cannot bend because it has a steel rod running through it—stretched out under the glove compartment. “Ah, cheese—milk’s great leap for immortality,” I say. “So, you’ve gotten over the whole age thing, then?” “It don’t make no difference.” “This is breaking news,” I say to her. “You sure you’re not going crazy?” “I don’t go crazy,” she replies, in her thick Polish accent. “I am crazy. I just go normal from time to time.” At 72, Danusha is twenty-five years my senior. She has barrel hips and salt-and-pepper gray hair. Her thunder thighs are full of strength, power, dedication, and courage. She is wearing a lavender-colored knit oversized-sweater and black polyester pants, with orthopedic shoes. The left one has a thicker rubber sole than the right. I am no longer friends with her daughter, Masha, whom I had met on the Internet before her mother the previous fall, seven months prior. Be strong, I whispered to my Wi-Fi in those days. But Danusha—whom her daughter has always called Mama Basha—and I now have a better relationship than she does with either of her daughters—Katia, the younger, included. It’s spooky. Danusha is always saying, “Love is not about how much you say I love you, but about how much you prove it,” or, “You don’t know until you know,” and stuff like that. Her grown daughters, though they each live twenty minutes away, only call her when they need something. She makes me feel as if she has known me since the womb. Coming up here was my idea. So far, it’s working out. Neither of us know how to act our age because we’ve never been this old before. I pull in at the Sunoco station on Haddon Street and roll down the driver’s side window. “Regular?” a Pakistani gentleman in a Sunoco shirt asks. “Yeah. Fill ‘er up.” I like saying “Fill ‘er up.” Buying gas in New Jersey is one of the pleasures of the move here. I hadn’t filled my own tank in Lord knows how long. And I never would again, as long as I kept on calling this place home. He fills the tank and out of my battered wallet I hand him a crumpled twenty. My wallet was like an onion lately; opening it only made me cry. I wished it was like a drink cup at Kentucky Fried Chicken and came with free refills. They said love was more important than money, but far as I could tell I couldn’t settle my delinquent court costs and fees with a hug. Still, no matter how broke we were we were still always rich when we went to Dollar General. “That was my last twenty,” I tell her. “I’m glad I booked this room at the beginning of the month.” “Me too,” she says, as we pull off. “But what are you going to do tomorrow?” We have had this conversation a dozen times. I said I would cross that bridge when I came to it. Which we both knew goddamned well meant I would probably end up having no choice but to spend another night in the backseat of the Hotel Cavalier. On the radio, an oldies station is playing Motown in its heyday. Smokey Robinson, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and somebody else named Junior whose name I don’t catch. The station is becoming noisy. We are heading into Cherry Hill, famous for its FM signal distortion. I didn’t mind living like a poor man. I just wanted to be one with lots of money. Danusha doesn’t like to talk about money. Growing up in Communist-run Poland during the height of the Cold War, money never meant a lot to her. Like most Polish families struggling to eke out a living during those times, they managed to be happy without it. We are both on fixed incomes. Another thread that unites us, and since my arrival I feel my poor spending habits...