“For this to make sense, you need to know a little something about me. The man before you who abuses his library privileges on a regular basis was not always this way.
I fucking hated reading. I hated it. It just seemed boring. It wasn’t hard for me. It wasn’t like I had some syndrome, something that made me say I hated reading when the real problem was that my eyes were running all up and down the page. It was a pure and real disdain.
In junior high there was this teacher who had us create reading contracts every semester. What you had to do was declare how many pages you were going to read. There was a certain amount of pages for an A, a B, and you get the idea.
Some broken part of my brain, and THIS part I consider a true disability, made me think it meant something to get good grades in school. So I signed up for the A.
Now, because I hated books and loved movies, me and the teacher worked out a deal. It was okay if I read novelizations of movies just so long as the movie hadn’t come out yet.
I don’t know if this is still a thing. It seems that now most movies are based on books that are already a couple years old. People finally wised up and decided that they could just cherrypick the ten books people were the most interested in, turn it into a movie, throw in a celebrity butt if it’s a grownup movie or a dragon made out of a shitton of computer code if it’s a kid movie.
So I don’t know if this is still a thing, but what used to happen is that a new James Bond movie would be coming out, and a month before it hit the screen you could go into the grocery store and pick up a novel that was based on the plot of the unreleased movie. This isn’t a book that existed before and got a new cover with the Pierce Brosnan. This is a novel based on a screenplay with a few pages of still images in the middle.
After typing that I realize how absolutely bananas the entire idea is. To give away your entire movie before it’s even out. And besides myself, I have no goddamn idea who was buying this stuff. They must have had a huge market spike in Northern Colorado.
Something we all know now is that there are dry periods for movie releases. Everyone wants to have this kind of movie near Oscar time, that kind of movie for the holidays, and the summer is all about action. So there were times when the grocery store shelves were a little spare.
My last pages for the semester came down to two possible choices. On the one hand, Bitch Factor. The only things I knew about this book were that its title was hilarious and that I would get to write the word “bitch” a bunch of times in a book report, which was appealing.
[note: just because we’re already taking a trip down memory lane, I dug up the book description for Bitch Factor:
Houston bounty hunter Dixie Flannigan is a legend in the jails and courtrooms for her combination of brains, cunning, and macho style. But she’s about to learn that there are limits to even her toughness.
Parker Dann, accused of killing a child in a drunk-driving accident, is a bail jumper, fleeing the prospect of a long prison term. Dixie tracks Dann to the wilds of North Dakota and has him safely cuffed and shackled in the back of her Mustang, when a massive Blue Norther blizzard hits.
It will take every ounce of Dixie’s Superbitch abilities to get them back to Texas in one piece, preferably before her bitch facade cracks…and before she starts believing that Parker Dann–drunk, child-killer, and bail jumper–is innocent.]
The other possible book was Maximum Velocity. Now, being dumb, I confused this book. I thought it was the basis for the Charlie Sheen skydiving movie. Which, for the record, is called Terminal Velocity.
I had a deal with the teacher, but it’s not like he’d know. What kind of English teacher has seen Terminal Velocity? The guy told us that at home he kept his TV in a closet so he and his wife had to roll it out if they wanted to watch something. Not kidding. I figured as long as I really read the book, it would be cool.
Well, it turns out that despite the fact that the book and movie share 50% of a title, they are not alike whatsoever.
Maximum Velocity, in my memory, is about a guy. He’s married. Then some other guy from his wife’s past shows up. An ex who turns out to be some kind of insane special forces guy who starts right in on a slow-mo home invasion thing where he’s banging the wife. Sort of.
It’s hazy, but one crystal clear memory is the special forces nutto explaining to the husband how they should double-stuff his wife. He says something about how there’s no greater sexual sensation than having your penis inside a woman’s vagina, and through her inside walls feeling another penis which is in her ass.
Let me take a moment to clarify my position here.
8th grade. I needed an anatomy chart to really understand what was going on there. A few charts. This was not a time when you could get online and find shit like this unless you put in a lot of time, a lot of effort, and even then, godspeed.
I was in way over my head. I was maybe ready for sexual craziness on the level of Look Who Developed Breasts Over The Summer. Just KNOWING that breasts were growing over the summer was plenty.
But. I had to finish the pages for the semester. So My position was to finish the book, write a book report on it, count the pages.
My memory tells me that the book ended with some kind of wind-powered iceboat chase. But that seems crazy.
So I wrote up a PG version of the book report. Because the thing that absolutely sucks about eighth grade is that you figure you’ll be in trouble for accidentally reading about something that’s a little more sexy than what you’re ready for.
The teacher didn’t have a great grade for me. He said the report lacked detail, which was fair, but the details it lacked were the ones that would have caused blushing on a level that would have robbed all my organs of blood and caused a faint at the least.
Guess I should have gone with Bitch Factor.”