Fat Vinny’s Forbidden Love

Fat Vinny, the most repulsive eighth-grader in the history of Tomah, is in love.

He has chosen as the apple of his eye the wrongest girl he could possibly pursue. Worse than that, he has decided to involve in his sexual awakening the only kid on earth whom he can call “friend.”

Fat Vinny’s weird romance, accompanied by disgusting poetry, drags our hero, seventh-grade Benjamin, into a world of sex where he doesn’t want to go. He has enough troubles already.

Father Finucan is furious about the “incident” at eight o’clock Mass. Sister Mary Ann is plotting his destruction. He’s learning “The Facts of Life” from Wes and Wally, who only know about it from dirty jokes. His “best friend” Koscal is a pain in the ass. And his big sister Peg keeps yelling at him to stay away from Fat Vinny. But every time he thinks he’s free, Vinny reels him back in… to the peeping Tom incident and the lost sneaker… to the two break-ins at the priests’ house… to the mad chase from the library… all the way to the high-speed climax in old man Geisendorff’s stolen Thunderbird.

A sampling of the provocative and often hilarious essays, sketches and screeds David Benjamin has written weekly for decades. Throughout, David Benjamin embodies a dictum that irreverent essayists, from Voltaire and Twain to Dave Barry and Gail Collins, have faithfully embraced: Nothing is sacred.

David Benjamin is a lifelong storyteller. His fiction includes The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked and seven books under his new imprint, Last Kid Books: Three’s a Crowd, A Sunday Kind of Love, Almost Killed by a Train of Thought: Collected Essays, Summer of ’68, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter, Black Dragon and Jailbait.  As a journalist, Benjamin has edited newspapers, published and edited several magazines, and authored SUMO: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport. In its first year, Benjamin’s imprint, Last Kid Books, won six independent press awards. His essays have appeared in publications that include the Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Examiner, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, EE Times and Common Dreams. Benjamin and his wife Junko Yoshida have been married for ages. They live sometimes in Madison, Wisconsin and sometimes in Paris.