It’s the late 90s. I was working at Verizon (then Bell Atlantic) in a 700-person customer service center.  One day, as with the thousands of calls I took in the two years I spent there, I answer a call with the standard greeting that I can recall to this day: “Thank you for calling the Bell Atlantic Residential Sales and Service Center. My name is Gradon Tripp. May I have the telephone number you’re calling about, starting area code-first.” The reply caught me off guard.

“Holy shit.”

Pardon me, sir? He introduced himself, said he works for a publishing company, and they just released a novel with me as the main character.

In The Wonder Boys, written by Michael Chabon, and the movie that followed (starring Michael Douglas), Grady Tripp is “a former prodigy, a pot-smoking philandering middle-aged novelist who has stalled on a 2611-page unfinished opus title The Wonder Boys.” (That’s from the back cover of the book)

Seeing as I’m only now in my early thirties, have never been labeled a prodigy, don’t smoke pot (or philander), this Grady Tripp is not me.

But still, whenever people ask me about the book, or the movie, I reply, “I have, and I’m still waiting for my royalty checks.”

Photo Credit: SIUE.edu