Book Signing Appearance at Bethany Beach Books for Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet

I will be appearing at Bethany Beach Books in Bethany Beach, DE at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, August 6, 2017 for an author book-signing event for my novel, Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet, based on my experiences as a rookie sportswriter in a small Florida city.

Appearing August 2016 at Bethany Beach Books to promote political memoir based on my longshot run for political office

Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet, published by Sirenian Publishing, follows a season of a rookie sportswriter who rejects a big-city corporate slog to pursue his passion in a semi-backwater Florida town where high school football is king, the coaches are royalty, schools from opposite sides of the tracks vie for supremacy, and the old-boy network holds sway.  Amid an intense season of high school football, the sportswriter discovers the coach of the worshiped local football powerhouse and scion of a family dynasty may have masterminded a conspiracy to return his alma mater to statewide dominance, and redeem himself in the process. As the sportswriter covers rivalries and relentless pursuit of the ultimate prize, and digs deeper into the scandal, he seeks to unravel the truth that could bring the beloved football program down – that is, if he doesn’t get run out of town first.

Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet is a humorous romp through 1980s Florida, a cross between Friday Night Lights and The Hangover, featuring eccentric characters and uproarious buddy adventures against the Florida backdrop, part Paradise, part Schlock.

I made an appearance in 2016 at the same bookstore, a block from the Bethany Beach boardwalk, to promote my political memoir based on my run for Maryland state delegate, Don’t Knock, He’s Dead: A Longshot Candidate Gets Schooled in the Unseemly Underbelly of American Campaign Politics. If you are anywhere in the DelMarVa Coast area on August 6, drop by and say hello!

Click here for the bookstore’s event promo.

Farewell Greatest Manatee Who Ever Was

It’s a sad day in Gulf Coast Florida and for manatee lovers throughout the world. A day after a birthday party celebrating his 69th birthday, Snooty the Manatee, the oldest manatee in captivity, was found dead under suspicious circumstances at the South Florida Museum’s Manatee Aquarium in Bradenton, Florida. Snooty the Manatee, the lovable sea cow, had been entertaining and socializing with audiences since calling the museum tank his home in 1949.

I met Snooty when I worked in Bradenton as a sportswriter in the mid-1980s. During our visit to his tank, Snooty took an immediate attraction to my friend, most likely because of my friend’s large 6-foot-6 1/2 frame, propelling himself out of the water to nuzzle.

Snooty was immortalized in my book, Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet, based on my experiences as a rookie sportswriter in a football-crazed small Florida town. Patterned after Snooty, Sneekey the Manatee develops an instant mutual kinship with a basketball player/teacher, the roommate of the sportswriter.

Now that Snooty has moved on to the Great Manatee Tank in Sea Heaven, I am glad that my book includes an ode to The Most Famous Manatee There Ever Was, who brought awe and delight to millions of visitors.

Manatees have faced harm from humans and boaters and near-extinction for many years. But the prehistoric, shallow water floaters are making a comeback, thanks partly to the work of the Save the Manatee Club. Consider supporting this organization.

Here is my tribute to Snooty, from a chapter in Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet:

Sneekey the Manatee

We had heard so much about the manatee – there’s even a county on Florida’s Gulf Coast named after the lovable, docile sea cow, also known as floating speed bumps by callous motor boaters who carve them up and threaten to drive them into extinction – we decided to visit one at the Drabenville Sloane Marine Aquarium.  We approached the admission window and saw the marquis announcing $15 for general admission and $20 including the 15-minute film, “Manatee: Peaceful Giant of the Shallow.” As I reached for my wallet, I heard an unusual sound behind me.

“BU-BU-BU-bu-bu-bu-bb-bb-b-b…”

“What the hell is that?”

Again: “BU-BU-BU-bu-bu-bu-bb-bb-b-b…”

“Shlomo, is that you? What’s that noise?”

“That’s the radioactive bagel.”

“The what?”

“You know, the Jew-dar.”

“Judo? You’re practicing karate?”

“No. Don’t you know? Jewish Radar. The Hebe-horn.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Whenever I’m about to pay too much, I start to sweat and the bagel goes off in my head. You know, BU-BU-BU-bu-bu-bu-bb-bb-b-b… It’s automatic. It’s a common Jewish affliction but it’s also helped us survive and prosper, you know, control all the banks and media and Hollywood.”

Shlomo motioned me to step out of line before I forked over a couple hours’ worth of paycheck. “Let’s go around to the side. I saw a door to the theatre there. You got to go through the side to get in free,” he said as he excused himself from the line and loped toward the theatre.

The manatee film was finishing its 15-minute loop and several Aquarium patrons left via the exterior door. Shlomo dutifully held the door open for the departing patrons and wished them “good day” as if he were the doorman at an exclusive New York Park Avenue apartment. “Follow my lead,” he said. As the last patron left, he casually entered with Dieter and me trailing, and continued loping along, feigning all-encompassing interest in anything that caught his eye – an Aquarium guide he found on a seat, a photo on the wall, a velvet rope – any distraction that would make him seemingly oblivious to anything else around him.

I followed Shlomo’s lead by meticulously inspecting a seat cushion, as if investigating for DNA. Eventually a Sloane employee cleaning and preparing the theatre for the next showing addressed the elephant in the room: “Can I help you?”

Shlomo continued intensely reading the educational display on the wall about the manatee’s diet and gestation cycle, completely enraptured.

“Can – I – help – you?” the usher asked again, this time in the loud, slow, meticulously enunciated cadence typically used with 80-year-old tourists. The usher approached Shlomo. Just as she did, Shlomo loped obliviously toward a statue of a giant loggerhead turtle on the opposite side of the theatre.

Visibly frustrated, and probably paid $6 an hour with no financial incentive to enforce any rules, the usher gave up chasing the rogue giraffe, finished her duties, and left the theatre, not even bothering to question me and Dieter, still curiously examining the architecture of the theatre seats, and with our more human-like size, much less conspicuous than the Sasquatch.

We hunkered down in our seats as paying customers began filing in the proper entry door and handing tickets to the usher. After the film, we sauntered into the main exhibit hall, right by the elderly security guy working a cushy retirement job, alongside the suckers who paid full price. Shlomo’s side-door, intensely-curious-demeanor ruse worked.

“I like to do things for free,” Shlomo repeated as we visited each exhibit room and aquarium tank.

We came to Sneekey the Manatee’s tank, a sad and dirty circular blue pool, like the oversized bathtubs that people who can’t afford in-ground swimming pools put in their backyards and euphemistically call an “above-ground pool.” Sneekey was 1,200 pounds and 40 years old and had lived most of his life in the oversized bathtub at Sloane Marine, so was used to people watching him, but apparently had encountered few as enormous and affectionate as Shlomo.

“Oh, Sneekey, you’re so beautiful. You’re so large and gray and gorgeous. I love you, Sneekey,” Shlomo kept repeating in his best bedroom voice. It seemed to have an effect on Sneekey, who elevated himself above the water to the top of the tank to get closer to Shlomo to…see?…smell?…hear? Who knows, but to get a better sense of a fellow gargantuan mammal speaking the language of love.

I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t actually see it, but it was clear that Sneekey was returning Shlomo’s affection by nuzzling up to him and coming out of the water to visit Shlomo frequently while ignoring the loud and obnoxious kids screaming for his attention. “Oh, Sneekey, blow me some lovin’ out of your pretty blowholes, you big boy, you. I’ve missed you so much!” Shlomo prattled on to Sneekey’s growing delight.

This love-at-first-sight encounter lasted 30 minutes until Dieter and I pried Shlomo away from the tank.

“I have to go but I will return. We will see each other again Sneekey, I love you, don’t forget that,” Shlomo bid, a scene as maudlin as Rhett Butler leaving Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind.” Before we left Sloane, Cheap Bagelman Shlomo plunked down a $195 check for a lifetime membership in the Save the Manatee Club.

Video: A Sportswriter’s Irreverent Romp through 1980s Florida High School Football

My post-college career began with the most entertaining job I have ever had to this day: sportswriter for a Florida newspaper in a small town, where high school football occupied major real estate on the sports pages, unlike many newspapers where the “preps” reporter would hang on the bottom rung. Football rivalries were heated, coaches were revered and fans were passionate. And Florida was, well…Florida: gorgeous and schlocky; honky-tonk and moneyed; citified and deep-fried; primitive and over-developed; bonkers over high school football; and hot as a sweat lodge.

Decades later, a novel came from my experience: Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet. This video about the Florida Football Sportswriter’s Novel will tell you more and give you a taste of the sportswriter life. It stars the author himself, in a half-assed imitation of a quarterback.

More description of the novel is below. Give it a glance on Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/adamsachs

THREE YARDS AND A PLATE OF MULLET

If you’re a football fanatic, then you’ve probably heard the term “three yards and a cloud of dust.” Well, in Drabenville, Florida, they do things a little differently.   Twenty-two-year-old Jake Yankelovich is learning that the hard way.

On the precipice of a soul-crushing slog into the corporate world, he decides to become a sportswriter—and he has to start somewhere…

As he covers an intense season of high school football, Jake is blown away by the passion everyone has for the sport. But as the new guy in an alien, insular town, he’s also running up against the old-boy network. That’s making it difficult for him to get answers about murky financial dealings and a dubious school redistricting decision that just so happens to have brought some of the best players in the state to perennial powerhouse Dolphin High, which had fallen from dominance.

Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet, a flashback to 1980s Florida, unites the worlds of high-stakes high school football with newsroom drama and hijinks, and eccentric characters, as it follows Jake working to make it in the business while finding his way around a peculiar culture.

Three Yards Book Review: Pat on Back or Punch in Gut?

If you’re going to ask someone to evaluate your written work, you have to be as ready for a punch in the gut as a pat on the back.

I got some of both in a lengthy, comprehensive review of my first novel, Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet. After reflection, as the saying goes, I’ve strived to “meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same,” taking both barbs and laurels in stride.

On the recommendation of a publicist, I paid a small fee to a writer/editor who reads and reviews books by independent authors and posts her reviews on her EMP Publishing website and other sites, including Amazon.

I respect and appreciate the reviewer’s opinions and the details she offered to back them up. She didn’t love or hate the book, giving a rating of 5 out of 10 to the novel about a rookie sportswriter’s adventures covering an intense season of high school football in a backwater Florida town and uncovering a conspiracy involving a powerful coach and elite program. She wrote:

“I grudgingly recommend this book for diehard football and sports fans, as the chapters covering anything and everything to do with this will be fun for them to read. If you like the ‘80s and constant cultural references (there are multiple nods to ‘80s songs, TV and films) that might be fun.

“If you like quirky, gonzo-pulp journalism stories, combined with ‘Friday Night Lights’ sports dramas (two genres difficult to mix), you might enjoy this book…

“If you can’t stand any kind of racism or prejudiced language, or you don’t care for misogyny, sexism or objectification and disrespect of women, this book is decidedly not for you.”

[Read the full review here.]

The words “racism,” “misogyny,” “sexism,” and “objectification” were initially hard for me to absorb. But after chewing them over, I embrace them. The book is intentionally irreverent, maybe over the edge in places. It is admittedly “politically incorrect,” and contains profanity and language that no doubt will be offensive to some.

Based on my own experiences as a sportswriter in Florida, the novel dealt with race, as Florida, like many places, grapples with segregation, cultural divides, abject poverty and clear perceptions of right and wrong sides of the track.

But the book’s content dealing with African-Americans – numerous characters in the novel were African-American — was not the subject of the “racism” the reviewer cited. She was flabbergasted by a chapter meant to be comical about a business relationship between the book’s protagonist Jake, a young Jewish soon-to-be sportswriter, and an Arab immigrant lingerie shop owner for whom he was hocking wares on city street corners to earn enough money to get to Florida. The relationship was feisty and based on mutual disrespect and profanity-laced insults, which the characters used as a sideshow to attract attention on the streets and generate sales.

Again, this was based on a real-life experience, but exaggerated ten-fold. But the reviewer hated it, citing several offensive passages of dialog.

On the citations of misogyny, sexism and objectification, I won’t plead guilty, but I acknowledge I can certainly be charged. Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet represents the point of view of a 22-year-old undersexed male and recounts his thoughts and dialog with his similarly immature, objectifying buddies. There’s a “raunchy” factor. I knew that most female characters in the book function primarily as the object of the male characters’ base desires. I’ve always been concerned about what female readers would think. Jake as much as admits that he’s a chauvinistic, sexist pig in this piece of internal dialog when he meets with the newspaper’s high-achieving, attractive female managing editor, cited by the reviewer in her review:

“I pondered whether I should feel guilty for being such a chauvinistic, objectifying, dismissive sleazebag in the presence of a smart, accomplished, regal, and dignified woman, but I really didn’t.”

Beyond the initial shock of reading those inflammatory, culturally explosive words used by the reviewer, I had to remember to separate the author (myself) from the fictional characters portrayed in the novel. The novel does not contain my thoughts and opinions; it contains the thoughts, opinions and actions of made-up characters. The novel, I must remember, is not me; it’s a creative expression.

My aim was to strive to create believable, authentic situations, dialog and characters while still being humorous and verging on outlandish and ridiculous in spots, stretching but not shattering believability. Real life and authentic people are not “politically correct,” and neither is Three Yards and a Plate of Mullet.

On the whole, I believe the novel is a funny, coming of age romp with a good sports story, insights into newspaper reporting, a conspiracy angle and buddy misadventure tangents, with one of the stars being the tropical paradise and mish-mosh schlock of Florida.

Some readers may be offended and insulted, as was the reviewer. I understand and accept. But I’m not sorry and I don’t apologize.

Take a read and let me know what you think.