No Easy Way Out
Like Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day, T.J. Brewster, the book's lead, is an unsympathetic character as the book opens, a philandering, acrophobic, irresponsible weasel trying to make it big in New York City by hook or by crook. But in the course of a couple of hot May days, T.J. suffers a world-class mid-life crisis when he loses his unfaithful actress girlfriend Frannie, his distant wife Carolyn, his wealthy uncle Earl, and his job at a Manhattan-based Internet Service Provider, a business with reputed Mob connections to which T.J. owes nearly $40,000 for his overdrawn expense account.
The only help his long-suffering wife Carolyn offers is to buy him a one-way plane ticket to visit his daughter Rayn and her family in Rocker, Montana, where T.J. spends a couple of miserable weeks fixing up an old Volkswagen bus. On a test drive, though, he discovers a black panel truck with “Pride Of Sicily Catering” written on its side headed toward Rayn’s double-wide trailer. In a panic, T.J. drives the dilapidated bus out of town and heads south, hoping to find succor and sympathy from his son Josh, a sophomore at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
There, instead of getting help with his predicament, T.J. finds himself driving Josh’s quirky but intelligent girlfriend Karma to her home in the Colorado Rockies. When she spots the black panel truck, T.J. heads further south to New Mexico, hoping to link up with an old flame named Alexis. In Taos, he is stunned to discover Alexis married to his old college chum “Sonny” Ray McRay. Sonny and Alex solve T.J.’s immediate financial crunch by hiring him to refinish their redwood deck, but he soon finds himself wandering around the Southwest, trying to stay a step ahead of the Pride Of Sicily.
In the course of T.J.’s travels over the next few weeks, a falling stone at an ancient Anasazi ruin nearly kills him, he overcomes his acrophobia, the black panel truck reappears, and he rescues a beautiful young French girl named Lisette from a fall into the Grand Canyon. Testing his new-found luck at a Las Vegas casino, he almost lands a lucrative job but again spots the panel truck, so he abandons the bus and hops aboard the first vehicle headed out of town, which holds one of the rides bound for a California state fair.
He spends a couple of hot and grueling but peaceful weeks operating the ride and helping one of the fair’s entertainers by whispering her young piglets to sleep. Then a chance television interview brings him to the attention of a public already clamoring, to T.J.’s great surprise, to find out more about this hero whose daring rescue of Lisette was captured in an amateur video. A follow-up interview on CNN lands him in an ill-fated relationship with an unscrupulous Hollywood promoter who hopes to exploit his sudden fame. T.J., who by now has discovered strength and integrity he didn’t know he had, finds he has to choose between the kind of success that passes for the American Dream these days, and giving himself up to the driver of the dreaded black panel truck. He makes both a surprising choice and a surprising discovery, but finds that, in keeping with the title, there really is no easy way out.
[One of my longer short stories, Zester, has a similar, somewhat unsympathetic lead character. If you'd like to read it, click here.]