Perry - Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets & Gatemouths Gator

I am a stranger in a strange town, and the man standing beside me has just removed his pants. There are mitigating factorshe is well-kempt, we are in a Laundromat, and as a registered nurse I have seen this sort of thing beforebut they fail to completely dissipate the tension inherent in sharing close quarters with a pantless stranger. I am in Seattle, on Day Seven of a paperback book tour that will have me on the road for twenty-nine of thirty-one days in October. There will be more road time in November. For the hardcover tour I mostly droveas far north as Duluth, Minnesota, as far south as Jackson, Mississippi. I put seven thousand miles on my Chevy. Checked into the Motel 6 so often that Tom Bodett owes me a house payment. A freelance writer should know how to spell and type, but one is equally served by a certain shiftlessness and an affection for truck stops. I have been schooled by truckers and country music roadies over the years, and it is paying off. The secret to getting somewhere isnt to drive fast, a trucker once told me. The secret is to keep that drivers-side door shut. When I drove, I had room in the trunk for clothes. On this the paperback tour, I am traveling light. Carry-on only. One week down, and laundry has become a matter of civic obligation. And so I have lugged my laptop and dirty socks some twenty blocks to this Laundromat, where Im typing against deadline while waiting on Dryer #11. Across the table, Mr. Sans-A-Pants is reading the sports page. Packers beat the Seahawks. Beer sales in Wisconsin remain steady.

Writers sometimes report that book tours are difficult. This sort of comment is unfortunate, and will be poorly received by single mothers, strawberry pickers and astronauts. In Covington, Kentucky, I received a call from my publicist, a heroic former dancer and Canadian named Tim. It was January, and I had been on hardcover tour since the previous September. Tim was solicitous: How are you holding up? I had seen a weather map earlier that morning. Back home, the day dawned eleven degrees below zero. My brothers were logging. My dad was in the middle of some deep-frozen field, flaking out hay for the sheep. The turkey factory workers, having struggled stiff-fingered in the dark to get their cars started in time to make day shift on the evisceration line, would now be well into their day of repetitive-motion meat slinging. I think Im going to be OK, I told Tim.

It can be a little frazzling. I was sitting in the Manchester airport at 1:49 p.m. on October 20, 2003, when Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards strolled past. I caught his eye and he grinned. I thought of toothpaste and hairspray. The contrast between our respective perkiness was alarming. Here was a man on a dead run for the highest office in the land and he looked like he was striding for the riser at an Up With People concert. As opposed to me, just three weeks into a little old book tour, looking like some sleep-deprived hillbilly who took a wrong turn on his way to the tractor pull. Of course, John Edwards had someone carrying his bags, and he wasnt afflicted with a world-class internal nose zit. I realize Im deep in self-disclosure here, but I believe the internal nose zit perfectly captures the glamour quotient of the self-propelled book tour. It appeared front and centerright at the tip of my nosein Portland, Oregon, the morning of my first television appearance of the tour. Pulsing red schnozz notwithstanding, I went on TV makeup-free, in part because I wasnt sure how to wield the pancake dealie (the only thing worse than no makeup is amateur makeup), and in part because I followed Mrs. Oregon 2003, and she used enough product for three of us. Nice lady, but her eyebrows appeared to be derived from a palette of ninety-weight motor oil. I posted these specific observations on my Web site, and subsequently received an e-mail from the Mrs. Oregon compound. In chastened fairness I must report that: (a) the correspondent demonstrated a gracious sense of humor; and (b) while I can get by looking like a rumpled dump truck mechanic, it is the duty of Mrs. Oregon to look like Mrs. Oregon.

As the tour moved forward from Portland, the zit thrived. It was one of those subdermal terrors, the sort that doesnt resolve itself quickly. A few days later, I spoke at an emergency medical services convention banquet and my nose had achieved such a Rudolph-like immanence that several vendors who were there to sell emergency lighting systems for ambulances approached me to see if we could work out some sort of endorsement deal. People were mostly polite about it. They somehow managed to maintain eye contact and pretend they didnt notice what had become a nostril beacon. But they did notice. The morning after speaking at the banquet, I did a book signing. A woman at the front of the line whipped out a tube of antibiotic ointment and squirted a dollop on my index finger. Put it on, she said. I looked at the line of about twenty-five staring people and my face flushed as red as the zit. Go ahead! she said. I recognized the militant mothering tone and knew resistance was futile. Dabbed a little on my nose. The inside, too, she said. I just sat there gaping, much like all the people in line. Go on, she said, in an eat your peas sort of way. And so we achieved what is so far my pinnacle book tour moment: your Correspondent, sitting in a chair before a handful of fans, finger up his hot red proboscis, swabbing bacitracin into the far reaches of his authorial nostril. Oprah, the boat has sailed, and you missed it.

The point was not to write about the book tour. The point was to convey how grateful I am for the chance to be out there at all. In 1989 I left a perfectly good career as a registered nurse in order that I might try my hand at writing. It was a half-baked decision at best. For years I wrote everything and anything: three-hundred-word pieces on call waiting for the local business newsletter; radio commercials for a used car dealer; a chapter for a medical-legal textbook about death by gunshot. My friend Al and I put together a television ad for a frozen pizza maker in which I composed and lip-synched the lyrics When its time to eat-za, I like Roma pizza . As a freelance writer, youre never really sure where your next gig is going to come from, so you take em all. Like any musician playing weddings, you are working on your chops, hoping for a chance to play your own stuff. You try to balance writing for the muse with writing for the bill collector. Here and there I caught a break. The progression was spotty, the details off-beat but interminable. Ill spare you the full reprise by simply saying, from the time I published my first piece of writing until I found myself in Seattle with the Pantless Man, fourteen years passed. I spent most of those years up late, typing. But I also spent time riding shotgun in the company of sculptors, philosophers, urologists and butchers. I have been invited to cross America with truckers, sleep on country music tour buses, and sometimes, just to write about life on my own terms. Last night I was working in my little writing shack when I heard a Del Reeves trucking song on the Airline transistor. Del sang, Im lookin at the world through a windshield/ and I see everything in a little different light, and I thought of all the words and miles and people and helping hands since 1989, and again, I felt gratitude.