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The Tall Poppies--a few days ago, they were just another Aussie band watching their fame ebb faster than a nitrous high. Then Stuart, the drummer, is gunned down by Australian drug lords, and the band is suddenly news in Australia, America, and even on CNN. Rachel, a chatty twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker, is the band's housemate. She digs Colin, the bassist, who has commitment issues. After witnessing the murder, she flees to the safety of family in NYC, where she bumps into Stuart, the "corpse," ordering tuna salad on rye at Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop. This is a story about sex, rock 'n' roll, the pressures of hipness, making it big, and reconciling family ties. And Colin and Rachel's own unlikely story of true love is the best unexpected salami of them all. "Full of fresh characters and crazy coincidences."--Library Journal; "An engagingly breezy first novel . . . has commendable energy and marches along smartly to its own arrhythmic, offbeat beat."--Kirkus Reviews; "The language is as crisp and dead-on as the movie Clueless, and the action as picaresque as Moll Flanders."--Frank McCourt, author of ANGELA'S ASHES. Laurie Gwen Shapiro is a native Manhattanite. Her resume includes time as a sex call screener for Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and as Peter Jennings's assistant at a publishing company. She now works full-time writing fiction and screenplays and coproducing independent films, including The McCourts of Limerick and Once When I Was a Cannibal. She's currently writing the screenplay for The Unexpected Salami which has been optioned for a film by Radical Media. Rachel: The Unexpected Salami
an excerpt from Chapter 3 of The Unexpected Salami
by Laurie Gwen Shapiro
[The] Coffee Bar [was] my new center of gravity. The man across from me at my long "antichic" linoleum table looked interesting, though a bit seedy, grinding numerous cigarettes into the ashtray as he sipped from his herbal tea. He had a zigzagging scar over his eyebrow; gray sideburns. I caught him ogling the two seventeen-ish girls in baby-doll dresses, braided pigtails, and patent leather shoes, particularly the girl with the D-cup chest. He saw me staring and probably thought I was coming on to him. He flashed his rotting teeth.
I'd learned about rotting teeth from Stuart. I'd had it to here with him and had wanted the guys to show him the door. But they said that it wasn't fair, he was paying his share: mateship bullshit going strong. I'm not saying all Aussie men wear slouched hats and burp their days away, but even the most sensitive Melbourne University philosophy major partakes in testosterone bonding; for a white male Australian to go against the two hundred-year strong societal grain is as inconceivable as a Savannah gent not opening a car door for a woman. My silver drop earrings went missing. Then my zoom-lens camera, my biggest purchase of the previous five years. I'd wanted the fucker out, but Colin and Phillip had tried to calm me down, suggesting that we try locking our individual doors. Then Stuart couldn't steal money or sell our valuables.
***
Ironically, I had to ask Stuart to pick my lock two weeks later when I dropped my keys on the St. Kilda pier, right into Port Phillip Bay. I couldn't afford a locksmith and Stuart was most obliging, completing the job in ten seconds. I offered him a chunk of the Katz's salami in the fridge as a thank you; my brother had sent the salami to me from the famous New York deli, subverting strict Aussie customs regulations by filling in "Restaurant Souvenir" on the official green form taped to the box.
Our sibling mega-joke, the unexpected salami. I'd wrapped one up in a Saks Fifth Avenue box for Frank's graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design. Tit for tat, he'd managed to have room service deliver a half pound one to me while I attended a vacuum physics conference in Chicago, the week after Will and I announced our engagement.
Stuart had eaten half the salami while I was at
an excerpt from Chapter 3 of The Unexpected Salami
by Laurie Gwen Shapiro
[The] Coffee Bar [was] my new center of gravity. The man across from me at my long "antichic" linoleum table looked interesting, though a bit seedy, grinding numerous cigarettes into the ashtray as he sipped from his herbal tea. He had a zigzagging scar over his eyebrow; gray sideburns. I caught him ogling the two seventeen-ish girls in baby-doll dresses, braided pigtails, and patent leather shoes, particularly the girl with the D-cup chest. He saw me staring and probably thought I was coming on to him. He flashed his rotting teeth.
I'd learned about rotting teeth from Stuart. I'd had it to here with him and had wanted the guys to show him the door. But they said that it wasn't fair, he was paying his share: mateship bullshit going strong. I'm not saying all Aussie men wear slouched hats and burp their days away, but even the most sensitive Melbourne University philosophy major partakes in testosterone bonding; for a white male Australian to go against the two hundred-year strong societal grain is as inconceivable as a Savannah gent not opening a car door for a woman. My silver drop earrings went missing. Then my zoom-lens camera, my biggest purchase of the previous five years. I'd wanted the fucker out, but Colin and Phillip had tried to calm me down, suggesting that we try locking our individual doors. Then Stuart couldn't steal money or sell our valuables.
***
Ironically, I had to ask Stuart to pick my lock two weeks later when I dropped my keys on the St. Kilda pier, right into Port Phillip Bay. I couldn't afford a locksmith and Stuart was most obliging, completing the job in ten seconds. I offered him a chunk of the Katz's salami in the fridge as a thank you; my brother had sent the salami to me from the famous New York deli, subverting strict Aussie customs regulations by filling in "Restaurant Souvenir" on the official green form taped to the box.
Our sibling mega-joke, the unexpected salami. I'd wrapped one up in a Saks Fifth Avenue box for Frank's graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design. Tit for tat, he'd managed to have room service deliver a half pound one to me while I attended a vacuum physics conference in Chicago, the week after Will and I announced our engagement.
Stuart had eaten half the salami while I was at