I’ve just finished the last major leg of my Kiss Me, Stranger book tour, reading exclusively at independent book stores and sharing the stage on many occasions with fellow Baltimorean and hilarious raconteur Jessica Blau. The tour took me to Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Boston, San Francisco, Santa Rosa (CA), Alameda (CA), Denver, and Cleveland. I met lots of lovely people and, generally, had a great time. My method of book selling included give-aways of candy (Presidential toffee), bookmarks, and posters of illustrations from my novel, so every stop seemed festive to me, despite the number of books I did or did not sell. Here’s my list of travel highlights:

Things I forgot to take: nail clippers (had to use scissors), sun glasses, ear phones, one all-important computer file that contained my itinerary, compact mirror, and hard copy of my itinerary. I should have taken the time to print out the itinerary while on the road, but I didn’t and so I sweated through my guesses about when and where I was supposed to be. When you’re renting 3 cars in 6 days, for instance, it’s hard to keep the car companies straight: is today Dollar? Thrifty? Budget?

Best reading partner: Jessica Anya Blau. She’s funny, generous, and kind. At every stop, she called on her friends and I called on mine, and together we had great readings, with lots of laughs.


Most surprising element of the TSA lines: shoe advertising at the bottom of the plastic TSA bins (in Denver). Who sells the ad space? Who gets the ad revenue?




Tiffany surprise: Cleveland is home to one of the Louis Comfort Tiffany’s impressive creations, the Wade Chapel, which has a huge stained glass window flanked by two huge glass-tiled murals.

Biggest triumph in passing through the TSA lines: nobody confiscated my container of hummus.


Best walk: up the coastal hills in Half Moon Bay, CA. Amazing path through red woods and ancient douglas firs took me above the fog-line and through several eco-systems on a sun-stunned, too-blue-sky morning. The spring flowers were in bloom. My naturalist friend, Ken, identified every one. He also told me storeis about mountain lions, which have returned in significant numbers (you’ve probably heard stories of them snatching unsuspecting bicyclists from mountain parks in southern CA).

Best radio: Seattle. Hands down. It must be the alt-rock capital of the world. Denver came in a surprising second.

Worst radio: San Francisco Bay Area. Schlock, oldies, and top-forty. Where’s the rock?


Best bread: Acme bread in Berkeley and San Francisco. Substantial, crusty, with a tinge of old world smoke.

Best pizza: Pizzaiola in Okaland, CA. They have coal-fired ovens. People line up outside before they open. It’s that good.

Worst pizza: Boston. I’m going to keep trying, Boston, but you’ve got me worried.


Best toy store: Mr. Mopps in Berkeley, CA. I love a good toy store, where I can immerse myself in the giddy, kiddy world of colorful gew-gaws and endless play. Mopps isn’t looking as robust as it once looked but it’s holding on. I bought something to support the cause.

Worst swimming pool: Ramada Inn, Denver airport. The water was greenish from algae.

Most puzzling encounter: In Oakland, CA, as I was coasting to a stop at a light (in my rental car), I glanced out my open window and saw a well-dressed man sitting at the bus stop. He was staring at me. He said, “Can you spare a few dollars? I need to get to Sunnyvale.” I could hardly believe that he was a panhandler. Still, I shrugged in answer, then drove on. I don’t give hand-outs to anybody except street performers.

Biggest culinary disappointment: I missed getting focaccia at the Liguria’s bakery in San Francisco’s North Beach. Theirs is thick crust, with a light coating of tomato paste and garlic oil and topped with a scatter of scallions (a very west-coast touch). I arrived at noon, only to find the “sold out” sign on the door. Inside, the woman at the counter was reading a newspaper. I said, “How late am I?” She said, “I could give you frozen.” I asked her if anybody else had good focaccia I could try. She shook her head doubtfully, then said, “You could try the place up the street.” Then the older woman sitting nearby — she was counting dollar bills — said: “It’s not as good.” I knew this. Still, I went up the street, bought a piece, tried a bite, then put it away. Nobody makes it like Liguria.

Biggest gaff among sports lovers: In Denver, a friend mentioned the Rockies baseball team and I asked, “Are they triple-A or big league?” The Denverite said, “They went to the world series in 2007.”

Most puzzling photographic moment: I peered into a cluttered, colorful vintage clothing store in San Francisco and decided that it would make a good picture for Jill, who loves vintage clothing stores. The place had the atmosphere of a old Brooklyn dress shop, just this side of a rag dealer’s den. As I aimed my camera, suddenly a woman appeared from the dress-cluttered gloom and shouted, “No pictures! No pictures!” She was middled-aged, with long hair she had dyed blonde. She spoke with an eastern European accent, which made me speculate about her suspiciaion “No pictures?” I asked. She waved me away. “NO pictures. NO!”

Quickest ad lib at a book reading: At Books Inc., in Alameda, CA, Jessica Blau noticed that there was a child or two in the store, so, as she read an excerpt of Drinking Closer to Home, she abruptly changed the word “penis” to “menis” and “fuck” to “feh.”

Best grocery: Berkeley Bowl. If you’ve never been to California, you can’t imagine how remarkable a super market produce offering can be. Berkeley Bowl shows you produce glories east coasters can only dream of. You want root vegetables? How about ten varieties? How about seven varieties of banana? How about the season’s first peaches? (This was May, mind you.) Oh my, I wandered the aisles in a daze.

Most interesting bar: After the reading at Denver’s fabulous Tattered Cover, my friend Doug took me to My Brother’s Bar, an atmospheric corner tavern that is old enough to have been the haunt of Cassidy, one of the infamous beat poets, who, from prison, wrote a friend and asked him to pay Cassidy’s bill at the bar. A copy of the letter hangs at the back of the bar, which, with its dark wood interior and waxed paper-wrapped sandwiches, seems to have changed little in many years. The bar’s music of choice is classical.

The most amazing jewelry: Ann Marie Montecuollo makes it from scratch in her shop in Healdsburg, CA.

Silliest review from an Amazon reader: I can’t help it; I keep checking my reader reviews on Amazon and Good Reads, even when I’m on the road. Let me remind you that Kiss Me, Stranger is about a mother and her 14 children who are trying to survive a civil war in a fictional country built on landfill. The illustrations in the book are supposed to have been drawn by these children. A reader on Amazon gave the book one star and wrote the following: “The so called pictures gave nothing to writing, not to mention they were poorly done. They looked like something a young child would do in Paint.”

Most amazing natural sight: a first-growth redwood stump, twenty-feet high, from which is growing a couple of new red woods, each about fifty-feet high. Redwoods are nearly indestructible. Their wood — impervious to pests and really hard — built much of California. There are still a few first-growth, 1,000-year-old monster red woods hidden deep in the forests of Northern California. Their locations are a closely guarded secret. Thanks to my friend Alan, who took me to this impressive relic.


Best oatmeal: organic, steel-cut oats at Blue Sky cafe in Half Moon Bay, CA. I never make steel cut oats at home because they take too frigging long. But, when somebody else makes them and makes them well — moist but not soggy — I love them.


Most sentimental stop: I visited the house I used to live in 30 years ago in Berkeley. Back in the day, i shared the first floor with two Berkeley coeds. Three others lived upstairs. The house is still a rental and still full of coeds. One of the girls happened to be holding a yard sale. As soon as she heard I’d lived there, she brought out the whole house. Everyone was eager to hear what the house had been like before they were born.

Biggest musical surprise: My friend Ken, in Half Moon Bay, has a drum set in his basement. So I got to get in some drum practice.

Most interesting gallery: Out of the Blue Gallery, Cambridge: floor to ceiling paintings from artists of widely divergent abilities crowd the walls of this tiny, one room building, home to the Dire Reading Series. The gallery owner is a small, graying tweedy man who would look at home in an Irish pub.

Strangest thing overhead in passing: a teenager said to his mother: “it went out the chimney and into the night.”

Biggest surprise while flying: the huge United Tri-jetliner from Denver to Chicago offered a pillow and blanket at every seat and — are you ready for this? — a doily over every headrest. Do you remember headrest doilies?


Most exotica per square foot: San Francisco’s Chinatown. It’s so authentically a Chinese melting pot, Chinatown defies its throngs of tourists and gets on with its business in the same old way. If you get off the main drag (Grant street), you could be in Shanghai.


Best falafel: Maha’s cafe in Cleveland’s Westside Market. Smooth and savory hummus with fresh-fried falafel. Did you know that the mid-west (and Detroit specifically) has the nation’s largest population of Middle Easterners? Maha’s is the best falafel I’ve had in a long time.

Tags: Berkeley, book selling, book tour, California, falafel, focaccia, Jessica Anya Blau, Kiss Me Stranger, Lois Comfort Tiffany, pizza, red woods, TSA

Related posts

• How to Sell A Book In America, Part II: road trip (2)
• How to Sell a Book in America, Part V: reader reviews (2)
• How to Sell a Book in America (7)
• What Happened to the Watermelon? (0)
• Living on Arizona’s Grid (0)

I love watermelons. In the summer, I will eat one a week. All by myself. If the day is particularly hot and I’m especially thirsty, I might eat half a watermelon in one sitting. So imagine my surprise and dismay when, just yesterday, I realized that I haven’t eaten a single decent watermelon all summer. Then I realized this: every watermelon I’ve bought this summer has been seedless. These are the only melons available in my two nearest grocery stores. So, what gives? Do the grocers think that seedless is best? Is this some kind of watermelon conspiracy to support corporate farms that are manufacturing the inferior but costlier seedless melon?

Let me be clear: seedless watermelons suck. Before this summer, I’d buy one occasionally on a whim. Every time — every time — I have been disappointed. Seedless watermelons are a) too dense and sometimes downright tough — you don’t get the textured chew that you get from a seeded watermelon, whose flesh has more air in it and, as a result, melts in your mouth;, b) too sweet but without any balance of flavor, like they’ve been infused with glucose or, in surrendering their seeds, have surrendered their flavor; c) or too sour — there is something wanting at the heart of these melons: their sourness seems an expression of loss. So, we get all of this melon failure in exchange for what, the absence of seeds?

Are you kidding? Seeds make eating watermelon fun. What’s more, that little bit of work augments the joy of eating — our mouths take delight in the exercise, which only increases our appetite. So let me say it straight: traditional — seeded — watermelons are more robust in size and flavor and, significantly, better looking, a rich dark green, which seems to say it all about their goodness. With the rise of the bloated, tasteless seedless watermelon, is my old favorite going the way of the tomato?

Here are a few fun facts from the Watermelon Promotion Board:

• The first recorded watermelon harvest occurred nearly 5,000 years ago in Egypt.
• Over 1,200 varieties of watermelons are grown worldwide in 96 countries.
• In some Mediterranean countries, the taste of watermelon is paired with the salty taste of feta cheese.
• Watermelon is 92% water.
• Watermelon’s official name is Citrullus Lanatus of the botanical family Curcurbitaceae. It is cousins to cucumbers, pumpkins and squash.
• By weight, watermelon is the most-consumed melon in the U.S., followed by cantaloupe and honeydew.
• Early explorers used watermelons as canteens.
• The first cookbook published in the U.S. in 1796 contained a recipe for watermelon rind pickles.

Mark Twain had this to say about the watermelon: “The true southern watermelon is a boon apart and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world’s luxuries, king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat.”

One old college prank was to wager than nobody could eat a whole watermelon in a single sitting, rind and all. If you attempt this in the usual water-eating fashion, you are doomed to lose the bet. The only way to win is to squeeze all of the water out of the melon first, eat the solid parts, then drink the liquid.

Here’s a watermelon story: when I was in my twenties and living in Berkeley, CA, as a musician, I rented rehearsal space in an sprawling old building that had once been a laundry plant. It was made of wood and should have been condemned. Two brothers, recent immigrants, owned it. The elder was trying to refurbish the place and rent out space to various enterprises. His dream was to turn it into an arts center. The younger brother, let’s call him Joseph Fong, spent his days driving around the Bay Area collecting old pianos, which he’d bring back to the plant and fix up to sell. He must have had fifty old pianos crowding the front part of the building.

One evening, Joseph arrived with an old-style farm truck and unloaded about one hundred watermelons onto the concrete floor just beyond his crowd of pianos. I assumed he had come upon a wholesale melon deal that he could not refuse. When he left, I inspected his coup: in the gloom of the building’s center the 100 melons lay, huge and ripe, like dinosaur eggs nearing their time. A poor musician (and mad about watermelons), I was sorely tempted to take one. But I did not.

Every day I would arrive at the laundry to practice my instrument and every day I’d see the watermelons sitting in their gloomy repository. By the weeks’ end, I began to worry for them. What did Joseph Fong have in mind? By the end of the second week, the melons were odorous. By the end of the third, they were blackening. They stayed, and rotted, for three months until they puddled the floor and that part of the laundry smelled like a meat-processing plant on a hot day.

Then one day, it was all gone, the concrete floor scrubbed clean, though the smell lingered for a while. To this day I wonder what went through Joesph’s mind as he wheeled his broken pianos into the laundry every day and smelled the rot of his forgotten watermelons. And what did he say to his serious, enterprising brother? It seems an example of good intentions — and dreams of commerce — gone awry. If you got one hundred watermelons tomorrow, could you get rid of them?

Tags: Berkeley, Mark Twain, watermelon

Related posts

• How to Sell a Book in America, Part VII: Road Trip Round-up (2)