Zack recently answered some questions on his website for his latest book, When Life Hands You Lemons… Throw Them At People!. “By the end of the book you’re either going to love me or hate me. And I hope that it’s love me, but essentially, you’re getting to know me; the real me,” Zack states in the interview.
“It’s a very funny book. At least funny to those of us with a twisted sense of humor,” Zack assures.
You can read the full interview HERE.
I know I didn’t release a new free chapter this month as promised. I’ll try to release it soon. I’m trying to meet a deadline people. Anyway, you can browse through the Table of Contents and let me know if there’s a chapter in particular you’d like to read and I’ll post it. Buy the book July 24th!
WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU LEMONS… THROW THEM AT PEOPLE: A Book About Growing Up, Screwing Up, and Moving Up, with Just and Ounce of Maturity - Written By Zack Peter
CONTENTS:
The Foreword to the Foreword / Foreword
Introduction
Zig Zaggin My Way to Heaven
Beer—It’s What Big People Drink
Split
Gimme Some of That Wine
Here Light My Cig
The LVP
Dear, Mom, Love Ya!
Nun’s Gone Wild
The Lockout
Mommy, I’m An Actor, Like Everyone Else in LA
Big Gertrude
Jeff
I’m In Compton Trick
Party Pee-ple
Untoned, Untanned, and Unstupid
Whoever Said Looks Don’t Matter Was Seriously… Ugly
Too Much
Too Much, Too
Losing An Old Lady
A Partner In Crime
Friends with Benefits
Strolling Down Cougar Lane
For Satisfaction
What Are Friends For?
Popping My Cherry On Sunset Blvd
Cocky and Cockier
Zackster the Prankster
Conversations with My Family
Life Handed Me Lemons (Epilogue)
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Here’s a new free chapter of When Life Hands You Lemons… Throw Them At People!
WHEN LIFE HANDS YOU LEMONS… THROW THEM AT PEOPLE!
A Book About Growing Up, Screwing Up, and Moving Up with Just an Ounce of Maturity
Written By zack peter
The LVP
When Life Hands You Lemons, Put in Minimal Effort
GROWING UP I was a star athlete… in my dreams. In actuality, I was always nominated for the LVP… Least Valuable Player. I never enjoyed playing sports as a child. Mainly because it was never my choice, so much as it was my mother forcing me to play. From baseball, to basketball, to soccer, to volleyball, to tennis, to football, she made me play it all. Unlike my brother EJ, I hated playing. He enjoyed them. Sports were more of his thing. Staring at the clouds, daydreaming in class, and over-eating were my interests.
I started playing sports at the age of five. It started with baseball. I hated baseball. I didn’t mind games because at the end of each game we got food and we didn’t have to do much unless it was our turn to bat. I really hated practice. I never enjoyed the running part and lacked the skill part. I was uncoordinated and never hit a ball off a tee. I always just hit the tee because it took more effort not to.
I was also always placed in the outfield for some reason, which didn’t help. I would never catch the ball. I either watched it roll right by me or I ran from it. I saw my glove more as a shield versus a catching tool.
Then came basketball. This is where I missed baseball. At least in baseball I didn’t have to move so much. Basketball was non-stop running. My fat ass barely made it half court before I needed an oxygen machine. I wasn’t the only fat kid on the team though. There was a chunky Mexican girl there with nappy hair. She was probably part black. Not because of the nappy hair, but because of her rhythm and moves. Even though she had lots of booty, she could move, and blacks are excellent athletes. She was always throwing her little tricks at me when it came time to pass the ball.
“Hey Tamicka, why can’t you give me a break once in a while?”
“Because, boo, I gotta show my daddy that I’m just as good as his other five kids. They are all boys and they are all fit.”
“Well show me a little sympathy and let me get the ball from you once in a while. I have family too, you know.”
“Fine. Don’t trip. I’ll give you one shot. If you miss it, that’s your fault.”
“I won’t miss it. Trust me.”
Tamicka’s fat ass threw the ball right to me, but she purposely threw it hard… at my face.
“What the hell?”
“Sorry, I thought this would be funnier. And the other kids gave me five bucks.”
“Alright, bring it.” I ended up hiding her lunch one day, which really pissed her off. She cried. It was priceless. Ah, what fat girls will do for their KFC.
After basketball came soccer. Another running sport. I obviously didn’t do well in this goddamn sport either. At least I was “learning my colors,” as my great-grandmother would put it, since I played with all white kids in baseball, all black kids in basketball, and now all Hispanic kids in soccer. And I’m not trying to be racist. I’m being honest. I don’t know how my mother always managed to place me on a team that was dominated by one race, but it never failed. Until football came.
Football was by far the worst. The amount of exercising was too much for my chunky-self. All the running and tackling. When we’d run drills I almost never tackled back. I didn’t know I was allowed to. I just ran toward the other kid and stopped halfway, awaiting yet another painful hit. It was hell for me. I played for two years. But I think I didn’t really enjoy these sports because I never understood how to play them. Part of it was that I never paid attention and the other part was that the coaches only stuck with the players that were the real MVPs.
It always sucked at the end of the season when it came time for the award ceremony because my family was the only group of individuals that clapped when I received the award for being on the team. As if being on the team was a real accomplishment. Everybody was on the fucking team! Never did I win the effort award, or most improved, and God forbid the MVP. One time, one of my awards had LVP written in Sharpie on the bottom left-hand corner. It was awful.
One of the last sports I participated in was track. I was actually on a track team, despite the fact that I hated running, if I haven’t made that clear yet. I was actually pretty damn good at it too. Not the quickest, but definitely the most dedicated player. My english teacher/assistant coach even made an announcement to my english class once.
“The track team is looking pretty good this year. Even Zachary is doing well. And to be honest, I’ve seen him at PE, and I didn’t think he could even run more than a few feet, but he’s not half-bad.”
I didn’t know whether to take it as a compliment or throw my erasable pen at him.
I never finished track because I became a tutor for first graders and it cut into my practice time. Can you believe they allowed me to teach first graders how to read? I was a seventh-grader with my highest grade being a B-, and that was an accomplishment… in art class.
The only sport that I finished willingly was volleyball. I actually enjoyed it and earned myself yet another LVP, but this time it was solely based on the fact that I was truly a lousy player and not because I put in less than minimal effort.
I tried out for the volleyball team twice in high school and never made it. That fact alone should say enough about my athletic capabilities.
Copyright © 2012 by Peter Zachary Gonzalez
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
The stories in this book are told to the best of the author’s memory. For protection purposes, names, dates, events, and descriptive characteristics and details may have been changed, altered, reordered, and/or compressed. Any resulting resemblance to any persons living or dead is simply coincidental and unintentional. Reader discretion is advised.
“‘Once you let go of negative people, positive ones appear…’ And the new people are called friends. And when Life hands you friends, you throw lemons at them. And the true friends, throw them right back and laugh.” — Zack (Quote from When Life Hands You Lemons… Throw Them At People!, on sale July 24, 2012)
I’m not evil. Just slightly bent and very twisted.
Here is an all new FREE Chapter of my new book, When Life Hands You Lemons… Throw Them At People! On Sale this July! www.JustPlainZack.com
CHAPTER 5
Here Light My Cig
When Life Hands You Lemons, Have Yourself a Dirty Little Cigarette
KIDS DO A LOT of stupid stuff. Like smoke cigarettes before the age of ten. Okay, maybe not all kids; just me.
When I was nine, I discovered that I had three younger cousins from Texas: Luke, Lance, and Loren. They were triplets. Or at least I thought they were. They dressed alike and even bathed together… past the age of seven.
When their parents decided to move to California, I befriended the triplets. We hit it off almost instantly, having sleepovers and pool parties and endless games of tag. One time, my mother took us to the movies to watch Rugrats, except we illegally snuck into Charlie’s Angels instead. The triplets (or shall I say the midgets, since they were so small) were instantly hooked. We came home that day and decided to play Charlie’s Angels. I was the tough Drew Barrymore character and the munchkins fought over the other two characters. If my memory serves me correctly, I believe the two “younger” ones tied two of their arms together and posed as Cameron Diaz’s character.
After our roles were properly assigned, we did kicks and flips all over my yard, jumping over the dog house and broken-down motor-home. We shot each other with our guns made out of our fingers and performed our so-called Kung Fu moves on each other, surprisingly, not seriously injuring anyone. We even took our leg-powered scooters up and down in the streets chasing after each other.
One thing that was lacking as a part of Drew Barrymore’s character was the lighter and cigarette that she constantly carried with her. Jeff was a heavy smoker and I knew where he hid his lighters… on the dressers, on the TV stand, on the counter, in between couch cushions, etcetera. I decided to walk around with one to add to my badass-ness. One thing that was a tad harder to find was an actual cigarette. Since we couldn’t find a fresh pack, we decided that the ones all over the ground in the backyard were just as good.
Since we all wanted to be “cool,” we each grabbed a lighter and each grabbed one of the old, half-smoked cigarettes off the ground. We decided that we would make one of the triplets the designated lighter. He would light the cigarettes and we would “smoke” them. Though we weren’t really smoking them since they were used and old and germ-infested and no longer properly lit. Which contrasted our baby-sitter, who was obviously very well lit.
We literally rode our bikes and scooters up and down the street while “smoking” with our cigs in hand and lighters in our pockets.
“Here, light mine again,” I would tell Loren.
“No, light mine first. It’s running a little low on smoke,” Lance would follow up.
Not only was what we were doing beyond unsanitary and disgusting, but our babysitter was doing a terrible job. I have no idea where she could’ve been if we were literally in the street in front of the house lighting cigarettes. Maybe we were playing hide-and-go seek again. She would often tell us to go hide while she counted the empty beer bottles and then passed out somewhere. Which is when we’d go “seek” the cash in her wallet. This is when the neighbors should’ve been calling Child Protective Services. But knowing them, they were probably just as wasted.
Eventually our cig-capade blew out when the triplets went home and their mother found all of their lighters in their pants pockets and the little rodents ratted on me saying that I was the one who initiated the idea and “forced” them to smoke. I forced them? Really? I forced them to take the muddy butt and place it into their mouths and them make them inhale? There were three of them and one of me. They could have easily over-powered me. They were just weak. I was always the “bad” kid. Bad is such a harsh word. I always considered myself the powerful one out of the four. The only one with a whole brain. I was the one who came up with all the good ideas. Granted, this was one of my not-so-good ideas.
After I got ratted on, my mother then sat me down and told me how wrong what I did was and how I should never again do something so stupid. Like she was so bright to have left us with that godforsaken supervisor.
“You could have burned the house down. What would you have done if that happened? How would you have saved your baby brother EJ? He could have been gone. What you did is very serious.”
I thought that I could use my Charlie’s Angels skills to hop through the window, grab EJ, throw him on my back, and breakdown the front door making it out unscratched. I didn’t know that it was impossible to really do that outside of the movies. I obviously now have more sense in me and haven’t touched another cigarette, used or new.
Copyright © 2012 by Zack Gonzalez
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
The stories in this book are told to the best of the author’s memory. For protection purposes, names, dates, events, and descriptive characteristics and details may have been changed, altered, reordered, and/or compressed. Any resulting resemblance to any persons living or dead is simply coincidental and unintentional. Reader discretion is advised.
We’re not the only ones!
If you don’t want to talk about it, don’t post vague status updates on Facebook fishing for people to ask you what’s wrong.
“Life threw lemons at me and I grabbed life by the balls, ripped them out, and threw them all around town.” — Zack #Lemons #7/24/12 (When Life Hands You Lemons… Throw Them At People!)
“Okay, reading that back, really makes me proud that I’m me. And really afraid that my life has become an episode of Glee.” — Zack #Lemons #7/24/12 (When Life Hand You Lemons… Throw Them At People!)
(Source: abnormallyzack)