A FEW LARGE CHUNKS

Latest Newspaper Column

Recently, the literary world was rocked by the controversy surrounding James Frey’s so-called memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.”

The book, (hereinafter referred to as “AMLP”) is supposedly the harrowing story of Frey’s battles with drug addiction, alcoholism, and crime. “I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal,” Frey repeats over and over, while calmly reciting some of the horrible experiences that particular trio of personal demons put him through.

The books begin with Frey hitting rock bottom: on a plane bound for Chicago, with no ID or money, wanted in three states, missing four front teeth, beaten, bloody and covered in his own vomit. (Boy, The Transportation Safety Administration was really asleep at the switch THAT day.) Of course, through rehab and personal gumption, Frey makes it back to sanity by the end of the book.

Well, no one loves a good recovery story as much as Oprah, who put Frey on the map and made his fortune by featuring “AMLP” on her show. Oprah herself was reportedly reduced to tears by the book, as were members of her production staff, who went on camera, eyes all damp and shiny, to describe how the book had moved them.

As we know, anything that makes Oprah & Co. cry is bound to make the cash registers ring. The book hit No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller List. It’s reportedly sold over three million copies and, we can assume, made Frey rich.

Unfortunately, it turns out that “AMLP” might just be a BOSPOBS, which stands for “Big Ol’ Steaming Pile Of” — well, you know. An investigation by the online muckracking site, “The Smoking Gun,” revealed that a lot of the incidents that supposedly befell Frey were totally fabricated.

It began innocently enough with TSG trying to track down a picture for its popular “celebrity mugshot” feature. They couldn’t find one from some of the more lurid crimes Frey claimed. They dug a little deeper. TSG reporters could find no police records to back up some of the felonies he said he’d committed.

He wasn’t actually involved in a horrible train wreck that took the lives of two girls, at least according to the girls’ parents. And so on. In the end, it turns out that Frey had originally written “AMLP” as a work of fiction, but it went nowhere. Repackaged as a memoir, however, the book was publishing gold.

You know me, folks. When I read something like this, I move quickly from “this is an outrage!” to “where can I get me a piece of it?” So, in my ongoing effort to make Dan Brown money off this publishing thing, I offer my own memoir, tentatively titled “A Few Large Chunks.”

I never knew my parents; I was found abandoned on the steps of a cut-rate Filipino tax preparation service in Slidell, La. As a child, I was bounced around between a series of orphanages, reformatories and opium dens. My first brush with the law came when I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. I was seven years old at the time.

I first turned to drugs at the age of five, when I discovered you could get high by snorting Nestle’s Quik through a rolled up copy of Highlights magazine. Since then, I’ve ingested marijuana, peyote, heroin, psilocybin, uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, dried banana peels, glue, paste, mucilage, LSD, DMT, STP, ABC, CNN, TLC, Sterno, Drano, Bondo, Ketamine, Dopamine, glucosamine, Ovaltine, and Krispy Kreme.

And I once did all of them in the same night. I woke up two weeks later, hanging upside down by my knees from a tree limb in Duluth, Minn., and singing the Aria from “Die Fledermaus.” In German. And I don’t even speak German. That’s how I rolled.

I once killed a stripper with a fondue fork and disposed of the body using an electric pencil sharpener. It took 14 hours.

I kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby. I was the shooter on the grassy knoll when Kennedy was shot. The only reason I missed is because I was completely plastered on cheap tequila and absinthe.

I know Tom DeLay personally.

There. That should just about do it. And hey, who cares if it’s true or not? Certainly not the American reading public. After Frey’s book was exposed, it didn’t budge from its #1 position on the New York Times’ Nonfiction Paperback Bestseller list.

The equally truth-challenged sequel, “My Friend Leonard,” perches at #1 on the Hardcover Nonfiction List. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, but apparently, if you can erase the lines between the two, it’s like minting money. And it makes Oprah cry, which is just icing on the cake.

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes and practices law in Carthage. Or so he says.