Title: Love in an RV Park
Author: Jeffrey Ross
Email: slipdoc@cox.net
Genre: Romance (For Men) Humor
Excerpt Heat Level: 1
Book Heat Level: 1
This quirky and fast moving romance revolves around
passionate lovers in tangled and mostly unfulfilling relationships. The tale is
complete with hot housewives, rock musicians, exotic dancers, motorcycles,
steamy nail polish-melting love scenes,
hard drinking college professors, hybrid alien children, a romantic bug
exterminator, girl fights, a New Year’s Eve
brawl, religious zealotry, prophecies
(The Temple of Just DOET) —and more. Ultimately, Love in the RV Park is about
the male perception [misperception?] of the female psyche—and the novel
attempts to answer an age-old question: What do women want? Laugh or cry—you’ll
come away enlightened after reading this zany romance.
EXCERPT
Johnny Roz
Retired English Teacher
Now,
Johnny’s one claim to fame was that he had graded over 430,000 essays during
his twenty-five year teaching career at Copperfield Community College. Johnny
was an old bachelor. He lived in a nice two-tone pink and silver travel trailer
owned by Luther and Leah Free. Johnny had lived there for nineteen years and
had never considered home ownership. His days were spent worrying about faucet
leaks, laundry, paying bills, and doctors’ appointments. Johnny’s cousin was
Dr. Jeffrey Roz, a somewhat formerly-famous poet, romance novelist, and scholar
who taught at nearby Hamilton State University.
Johnny’s
story was pretty calm. He couldn’t tell you where the years went. He was young
once, went to a few meetings, then he was fifty-three and eligible for the state
retirement system. He had owned three or four dogs in his lifetime, a few used
cars, and might have been to Saskatoon once. That’s it. Except for the time he
nearly killed himself drinking tequila shots at a CCC staff Christmas party in
Casita Grande. The next morning, he woke up covered in sleet on somebody’s
patio, pants gone, nearly hypothermic.
Johnny
was a capable and careful man who kept a clean apartment. He wasn’t hooked up
to cable, or dish TV, but he occasionally watched network events on the seven
inch screen antenna-driven handheld model he bought at Sticky Mart for forty
bucks.
Johnny
had never been married. He often wondered about the life he lived, and realized
financial security provided little in the way of emotional comfort.
Johnny
had always been fascinated by women, but had realized few “connections” with
them. He had maintained female friends at work, but not many. Women, to Johnny,
seemed to represent some kind of problem—a beautiful yet complicated problem.
A
bit of a rhetorician, he often spent his days contemplating, analyzing, and
critically reviewing the following question relating to human behavior: What do
women want? Ah, Johnny knew Chaucer had an answer, Jerry Springer was curious,
Virginia Woolf had a speculative idea or thirty, and Hollywood had churned out
their notions in millions of senses-numbing bad movies, but he himself was at a
total loss. Since he didn’t know the answer, Johnny often surmised he would
remain lonely and solitary. Snap.
Sometimes
he woke up at night sweating, nearly panicked, and thought about his past and
the emptiness of his meager experiences.
John
was having a series of dreams lately—those kinds you have in the moments before
you wake up—which were totally depressing him. In the dreams, the formula, the
plot line, was nearly always the same. To wit:
Julia,
an attractive and unhappily-married housewife from down the street, knocks on
his door. He opens the door to see her, smiling, holding a measuring cup in her
left hand. In each of the dreams, she has asked for something
different—sometimes sugar, sometimes milk, sometimes cream, sometimes salsa,
sometimes peanut oil. Once she even asked for cloves of garlic. He invites her
into the front room, takes the cup, and finds the spice or ingredient she needs
back in the kitchen. When he returns to the darkening room, she is always
sitting on the couch, twirling a strand of auburn hair with one hand, and, with
the other, patting the couch, signaling him to sit down next to her, next to
her shapely form.
Her
lips are pouty and beyond energized. She breathes heavily, with poignant and
powerful desire. Her legs cross and uncross rhythmically. Um. Can you feel the
heat?
Johnny
always places the cup on his beat-up old coffee table and looks into Julia’s
clear eyes—crystal pools of composure and need.
She
puts her arms around him and nuzzles his chicken-skin wrinkly neck, and then
she snuggles into Johnny. Now her lips are moist and panting. The old guy
reaches out and hugs her, feels her curves, and is overwhelmed by a gloaming
sense of comfort, love, connection. Her breath is sweet, her hands are satin,
and the moment is warm and complete. One might say his senses are satiated,
short circuited, nurtured, mesmerized, and radicalized. In other words, he is
turned on but in a very private, emotionally pure, and enriched manner.
He
smells her grace and beauty. Her grey eyes look into his for just a moment, and
he can see into eternity—blazing, abrupt, and terrifying. The smart phones are
silent; the music is quiet. Only her pulsating and harmonic breathing remains.
The aroma of the eternal, the archetypical perfect female drifts into his
nostrils. His being becomes an integrated whole—unified and sanctified. She
murmurs pleasantries, licks his left ear lobe, then stands up, straightens her
straps, and leaves, thanking him for the cupful. He admires her tight jeans,
her straight hair, and her long neck as she leaves the room.
But
the dream is always pure and potent and always the same. And comet quick! The
sequence takes about thirty seconds, probably. This is the most love Johnny has
ever felt.
And
he wakes up tired, turns on the calcium-corroded coffee pot, and lurches into
another lonely day.
Sometimes
when Johnny was outside, he would see Julia coming down the street, perhaps
walking the dog, or jogging, or visiting a friend. At such times, old Johnny
turned away; he could not bear to see her curves, straight hair, and grey eyes.
How much eternity could a man take?
Truth
was Julia wasn’t married. Oddly enough, she often thought of old Roz and
wondered about his life, his style, his weltanschauung. Crazy. She was
miserable, too.
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