Love and Other Pranks

"A masterful story..." —Seattle Book Review

"May be the single wildest novel I've ever read. It rings the cosmic gong on so many levels, turns so many stereotypes inside out, one scarcely knows what to do but hold on and enjoy the ride. And enjoy it I did."

—TOM ROBBINS

Acclaimed for his surreal, satirical vision and his “consistently dazzling” (Kirkus Reviews) writing style, cult favorite Tony Vigorito stretches the boundaries of storytelling beyond all limits with his long-awaited third novel. A quest to find the treasure of all treasures launches this swashbuckling tale of romance and high adventure across three centuries and takes you on a hilarious and visionary journey that includes lovers, pirates, bank robbers, treasure maps, yoga cults, love potions, assassins, con artists, quicksand, smugglers, and rock-paper-scissors. Welcome to the “incomparable imagination” (Minneapolis Books Examiner) of a Tony Vigorito novel. And beware the meadow of marvels...

"A deeply original and satisfying book."—Booklife"Opening with a satire of the Adam and Eve story, this book moves seamlessly back and forth between eighteenth century Caribbean pirates with a treasure map and twenty-first century San Franciscans contending with a false New Age prophet. The author controls these seemingly disparate scenarios with humor and panache, creating such memorable characters as a guardian parrot, a bumbling true believer, and a herd of cowbell-wearing bison somehow relocated to a tropical island. This is a deeply original and satisfying book." —Booklife

Praise for Love and Other Pranks

"One of the best novels I have ever been fortunate enough to read... Delights and mesmerizes from the very first page.

.. I highly recommend this to everyone." —San Francisco Book Review (more...)

"Love and Other Pranks may be the single wildest novel I've ever read. It rings the cosmic gong on so many levels, turns so many stereotypes inside out, one scarcely knows what to do but hold on and enjoy the ride. And enjoy it I did." —TOM ROBBINS, bestselling author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume

"Stylish and surreal… A wild ride… Impossible to put down… A novel that can be parsed several times to uncover new meaning, Love and Other Pranks is a must-read." —Foreword Reviews (more...)

"A dazzling dreamwalk…

 Quirky and witty… A masterful story… 

Highly recommended if you want a book that makes you think and that presents deep and thoughtful questions couched in wry humor so as to not overwhelm." —Seattle Book Review (more...)

"Hot damn, Tony Vigorito is a marvel! Love and Other Pranks is a wisdom-wielding, gut-laugh-inciting, ribbon-twisting, lust-spurring, thought-bending, all-out adventure. When listing the great smiling American prophets — Twain, Robbins, Vonnegut, and Moore — Vigorito lands near the top!" —OWEN EGERTON, author of several novels including The Book of Harold, and writer/director of the thriller Follow

"A unique, dazzling novel that breaks the conventional rules of storytelling... 

A work of great imagination… Will entice and have readers utterly enthralled. The writing is crisp and impeccable... Absorbing, intense, and intoxicating…" —Manhattan Book Review (more...)

"Readers eager to hear young, antihero, Tom Robbins–esque lovers declare their adoration for each other will certainly find contentment within these pages. For those less intrigued by spunky love birds who insist “life is performance art”..., all is not lost. What helps to set the story apart from similar fare are the nuanced, often unexpected villains, animals, and Biblical allusions along the way. A boy-meets-girl tale that veers into strange avenues and offers a maelstrom of love-struck possibilities." —Kirkus Reviews

"Love and Other Pranks is, if anything, original… There’s adventure and romance on every page. What is more, Vigorito has a unique voice… His writing style bears many similarities to the late Terry Pratchett – mostly when it comes to the humorous flourish in his work... Excels in the absurd and the hilarious, which shine brightly in his dialogue, scene set-ups, and characters." —Portland Book Review

"If you’re the type that loves high adventure, twisting plotlines..., laugh-out-loud sentences, some of the most creatively described sex scenes ever, and heaps of never-cheesy true love between two totally fascinating main characters, then you’re going to adore this book." —Asheville Grit (more...)

excerpt

Prologue: In the Beginning

The first time Adam kissed Eve, she was brandishing a Granny Smith in her grin as if she had just bobbed it out of a cider barrel. Obviously, Adam could not proffer a proper kiss so long as Eve wielded that apple between her incisors, so clever Adam settled for lodging his teeth into the open end of her apple. Then he growled.

They had been flirting famously, and Adam had just announced his incipient kiss. Eve’s immediate response had been to wedge the fruit between her grinning teeth, presumably as an impregnable barrier. Not exactly a come-hither, but Adam chose to receive it as a dare, and really, there didn’t seem to be another option in any event.

Certainly, Adam could have accepted it as a cruel rejection and crept away, but that would have been unbearably craven. He also could have slapped the apple out of her sassy lips, though of course that would have been frightfully belligerent. Or, he could kiss her anyway—inasmuch as the circumstances would permit—and let neither fruit nor folly come between them.

Adam chose wisely. He knew this as soon as Eve overcame his apple-begotten audacity and growled right back at him. Actually, she snarled and tugged at the apple like a starving wolf, but Adam held on and gnashed back as if this frothing apple was indeed the last desperate scrap of carrion. Immediately, Adam realized that Eve’s apple-grappling technique was impressive, twisting her head and yanking suddenly sideways in her fierce attempts to rip the apple from his teeth. It was everything Adam could do to keep up, adjusting his pressure and pull against her ferocity and finding little opportunity to assert his own assault until an impulse suggested he cease the struggle and yield to that which he had been resisting. Thus informed, Adam pitched his face forward in instinctive jujitsu, slacking her yank and loosing her clench just long enough to successfully tear the apple free, at which point he crunched through his end triumphant and taunted the twice-bitten apple in his grasp.

Defiant, Eve chewed her apple like it was a wad of chaw in a quick draw. Adam flashed his teeth and imitated her in turn and they glared at each other eyes aflame until Adam tossed the fractured apple heavenward. Their eyes unwavering captured the pulse of one another’s lips swollen in mutual anticipation, and as the airborne apple touched the apogee of its ascent they at last dared mingle the nectar sweetening their tongues. Kissing their way into one another’s hearts, he sucked her upper lip and she nibbled his lower as the apple bonked off both of their skulls, though this kiss would not be dissuaded.

If their eyes had yet been open, they might have spied an angel and a devil toasting their kiss, eyes wild with mischief as if they had just lit a strip of firecrackers in a henhouse.

If only it had been so pointless a prank.

Part One: Yes, and Nectar


1

San Francisco, early 21st century

Truth be told, Adam’s name was Merlin—Merlin Otherwise—and he had been calling himself Adam that night only because that is how a couple costumed as an angel and a devil had earlier that evening addressed him. And truth again be told, Eve’s name was Lila—Lila Louise—and Lila was just being coy when she introduced herself as Eve in response to Merlin’s allegation of Adam on top of a gigantic and shimmering opalescent king cobra float on Halloween night in San Francisco. Lila and Merlin were in the Castro, atop the lead float in an illegal parade that had successfully revived the traditional Halloween-in-the-Castro street party banned by the city so many years ago, and when they kissed, a roaring cheer erupted from the assembled throngs. Naturally, it is possible and even probable that the crowd was cheering not their kiss but the fact that the flamethrower mounted in the king cobra’s mouth had just belched a tremendous blast of fire, but listen, who among us would question the mythos of love?

Certainly not a pirate, which is how both Lila and Merlin were dressed. Merlin had swashbuckled his way onto the exclusive Bay Area hipster cobra float, uninvited and knowing nobody whatsoever but leaping aboard nevertheless as though he were its belated captain, black pirate shirt billowing open in the breeze, chest and face painted for the glory of Poseidon. Lila noticed him immediately, though when he eventually approached she pretended otherwise.

“We’ve met before, I’m certain,” Merlin opened, doing everything he could to avoid examining this redhead’s pirate getup, her own white pirate shirt billowing also wide-open to reveal a seashell bikini top, though even that enchantment was not so seductive as the golden pendant she mesmerized about her neck.

“I’m certain we have not,” Lila replied, tossing a Granny Smith in her grasp, an apple she’d been contemplating crunching into for the last half hour.

“I’m certain that we have,” Merlin insisted. “It was the eighteenth century, wasn’t it? Aboard that bastard Goldtooth’s man-o'-war? Somewhere off the coast of Bermuda?”

Lila toyed with her golden pendant, smiling, as she turned to face Merlin completely. “What is this nonsense which now confronts me?” she demanded.

“Yes,” Merlin pursued his bullshit concoction, encouraged. “I remember it all now. You jumped ship off Hispaniola with a group of runaway slaves, and so swift was your cutlass that no man dared touch you uninvited, let alone defy your assumed leadership. Then, the motley lot of you found your way back aboard your pig husband’s ship and overthrew him, for he was just an imperialist tool who’d kidnapped you from your village in Ireland and treated you like chattel. Plus, you wanted your own ship with which to make an honest living undermining the slave trade. Yar, always the principled pirate, you were. Flaming Jane, they called you. I’d recognize that flame of red hair anywhere, and still flaunting that Möbius band pendant, no less.”

Lila again touched her pendant, impressed that he knew of its geometry. “Perhaps your story is true,” she played along, “but you still haven’t told me from whence I should know you. A swaggering hotspur like yourself, for all I know you could be one of Goldtooth’s scoundrels.”

“Savvy this,” Merlin grinned. “If I were one of his scoundrels, I would not have then warned you of his murderous intentions. And I have to say,” Merlin drew in close and lowered his breath. “Yours was a brilliant gambit, my lovely.”

Lila smiled, smitten. “And what was your name?”

“Crow, they called me then, though tonight I go by Adam. And what of you, Flaming Jane? What are you called in this go-round?”

“I suppose you can call me Eve,” Lila lied. “But one question remains unanswered.”

“And what might that be?”

Grinning sly, Lila pointed her apple at him. “I’m curious why I would have told some tangle-bearded traitor all of this?”

“Because.” Merlin straightened himself dignified. “We became lovers.”

2

Somewhere in the Caribbean, early 18th century

The gentle pitch of the ship oscillating across the waves that had lulled Crow into a fever-befuddled delirium now blindsided him wide awake. A rogue wave slammed into starboard like the pelt of a blue whale flung by a drunken pissed-off Neptune, cascading seawater everywhere and leaving cries of curse and alarm in its wake. Crow bolted upright and happened to catch a toppling hourglass just as Flaming Jane came banging into the captain’s quarters, though when Flaming Jane met Crow’s eyes, instead of apprehension and confusion she found only wonder.

“Tempt me with your outlaw apple,” Crow whispered the lyrics of the song that had serenaded his dreamscape into the waking world. “With eyes that flash so wild—”

“You’re okay,” Flaming Jane observed breathless, illuminating him with her lantern and steadying herself against the creaking moaning hull. “Your fever’s broken.”

“Answer me it’s oh so good with lips that dare and smile,” Crow continued reciting his dreamsong, embracing the hourglass as the ship’s thirty-pound Maine Coon mouser named Catface nuzzled against him. Pausing, Crow grew a smile. “As we lick yes, and nectar!”

Since Flaming Jane believed in the oracular power of dreams, she indulged his dreamsaying, though not his poetry. “No more poetry!” she demanded. “Tell me your dream! Quickly now, before it dissolves!”

Crow complied, still blinking wonder. “We were riding a white snake across the sea, and there was an angel—no, a devil—and I told you my name was Adam and you told me your name was Eve and you had an apple and we kissed and you told me you were a pirate and then I told you this wasn’t really happening.”

“What wasn’t really happening?”

“Life.” Crow paused, the dream vanishing into perplexity. “And then I told you there was something worth more than even gold.”