by Timothy Martin
He was the last of a dying breed, a hard-drinking, pickup-driving man at the end of an era, confused by a time of dwindling timber resources and the fading dignity of sweat and physical toil. She was a tall, good-looking, long-legged woman with a tiny naked Smurf tattooed between her breasts, and who subsisted on tobacco smoke and beer. Together they were Earl and Charlene, and this is their story...
Hold on, I know what you’re thinking. Not another one of those damned sappy romance novels designed to titillate women, brow-beat men, and bore the living hell out of anyone who doesn’t go all weepy-eyed over daytime soaps, homeless puppies, and sentimental music by Barry Manilow.
Wrong. This is not a tale of love and confession among the rich and unethical. It’s not a story of stucco mansions, high-maintenance women, or fancy-ass dining in haughty French restaurants. What you hold in your hands is something new and altogether different.
This book is a tacky testimonial to bad hangovers, cigarette burns, scrotum-tightening rebel yells, and anyone who can belch and say their name at the same time. It’s a fist-flavored homage to those who live in seedy double-wide trailers, watch TV in their underwear, wear billed caps with automotive associations, fish with dynamite, and affix yellow ribbons to oak trees. In short, Third Rate Romance is a twenty-one shotgun salute to blue-collar America.
It’s a tribute to love and romance, too. And I don’t mean that prissy Bridges of Madison County kind of stuff. I’m talking tongue-kisses, titty-feels, crotch rubs, and bodies wedged together in unhindered and unholy union. I’m talking eager, pink, tangled up in the bed sheets, spank me, lick me, do-whatever-you want-with-me sex. What I’m talking about here, friend, is humping that’s hotter than Ted Nugent’s Biltong Beef Jerky, flamethrower flavor.
You will find no mention of courtship, tenderness, or faithfulness in Third Rate Romance. You will hear no declarations of undying love, either. After reading this book, you will still enjoy Ultimate Fighting, monster truck races, bass fishing, and groping your girlfriend in public. You will continue to take pleasure in titty bars and driving full speed through red lights. You will retain your affinity for fried food, the NRA, John Deere tractors, ruined vehicles, and anything that explodes in a really, really big way.
A word of caution though, Third Rate Romance is not for the faint of heart. This book is dangerous literature. It’s a reader’s equivalent of a steel splinter from a grinding wheel striking you in the face. It’s an angry bull crushing you against a gate. It’s a skinned knee, a nosebleed, and a concussion from a car that’s slipped off the jack and landed on your head. This is a novel that will grab your testicles and give them a good, hard shake.
That’s where the truth lies, in the testicles. It’s a well-known fact that a man’s marbles maintain full and complete control over his brain until he’s about one hundred years old. You can look it up. Or better yet, ask your wife or girlfriend.
Here’s another fact: Sometime in the future, when novels like Pride and Prejudice, Gone with the Wind, and The Thorn Birds are holding open a door or steadying the leg of a chair somewhere, this book will still be flying off the shelves. That’s because Third Rate Romance is a one-of-its-kind, off-kilter, superheated story that throbs and pulsates with sex, satire, and more than a few repellent characters. Believe me, it’s guaranteed to get under your skin and give you an itch that won’t go away.
So grab yourself a beer, park your ass in the recliner, and enjoy this hooch-sweetened, lust hardened, purely nasty tale of coon dogs and corn dogs, cheating hearts and broken culverts. If Third Rate Romance doesn’t crank your love thermostat up to sizzle and have you howling at the moon, I doubt anything will.
There are songs that come from the heart and soul. This is not one of them. There are songs that come from the mountains, the valleys, and the rivers. This is not one of them, either. There are songs that come from between the damp, sticky sheets where lovers wrestle in wild abandon. This is one of them.
It is early morning in the spring of 1993. I’m at my desk searching for a bottle opener when the telephone rings. On the other end of the line is a former resident of Eureka, California, named Ruby Harmon. Ruby lives in Redding now. She has a story to tell I might be interested in. She extracts a promise. If I decide to write the story, I must agree never to disclose her whereabouts (1203 Beale Street) or her identity to anyone. All right, that’s reasonable. After all, it’s her story, not mine.
So Ruby talks, and I listen. And I drink beer, lots of beer; several six packs to be precise because the damn woman just won’t shut up. She chatters on and on in a high, twangy voice like a mynah bird on methamphetamines, never once stopping to catch her breath.
Ruby continues to babble well into the clockless hours past midnight. She talks so much I want to take a stick and beat her tongue to death. She talks until I wish someone would kick me in the ear so that my hearing would cease.
By the time she’s done I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to know about hot-blooded men who work all day and drink all night, restless women who live only to party, rough marriages on the rocks, physical yearnings, lap dancing, fist-fights, horrendous car wrecks, and the strange, sordid romance of Earl Perkins and Charlene Bickle.