My new favorite book is one of those perfect finds that only come along once a season, and the title says it all: FLAMING IGUANAS: AN ILLUSTRATED ALL-GIRL ROAD NOVEL THING.

How can you not pick up this book? Everything about it screams for it to be read and enjoyed. It’s an adorable 7" hardback square book that looks like it was wrapped in a shopping bag (paper, please), with brown pages, a funky but easy to read type face that looks like someone’s journal, and dozens of illustrations with a ‘50s flair that are priceless.

Just page through the book, read the titles of some of the chapters, and see if you can put the book back on the shelf unread (Chapter 8: Ma’am is a Big Old Thing with a Republican Hairdo and Her Tits Strapped Back; Chapter 25: The Downside of Trailer-Park Passion is the Shiny Acrylic Sweater That Comes With It).

The novel is the brainstorm of Erika Lopez, a cartoonist, artist and fiction writer who recently drove across America on a cheap bike. Her voice speaks through the character of Tomato Rodriguez who, like Erika, is looking for a half-Puerto Rican Quaker bisexual role model.

Tomato meets Magdalena when she runs over and kills her cat Snowball while trying to learn to ride a Vespa scooter. Magdalena doesn’t know who the murderer is, and eventually the two decide to ride motorcycles across the country and settle in California. The vision of a high speed bike trip where "women wearing pink foam curlers in passing RVs will desire us and we’ll slowly turn to them at 75 mph and mouth ‘hello’ back," where "truck stop waitresses will wink and jam dollar bills in our happy little beautifully tanned fists" is quickly shattered. Tomato has never been on a motorcycle before, and certainly doesn’t know how to ride one, but she waits until the day before they leave to buy one and give it a test drive. This should tell you plenty about the wacky adventures to come.

It was a trip destined for disaster from the start. When tempers finally flare to the bursting point, Tomato admits in a rage that she was the one who ran over Snowball, and Magdalena drives off in a fury, leaving Tomato to fend for herself. Back on the highway, Tomato senses a mysterious presence, and is convinced that the translucent soul of Snowball is bobbing over her shoulder. She tries to contact the dead cat in a make-shift seance with a match in a gas station bathroom and asks Snowball to become her guardian angel. Yes, she’s this wacky and fun!

The trip across America moves slowly on, but it’s not the trip it’s the digressions about life, death, love, art, cynicism and getting by that captivate and move us. From therapy ("I have gone back to old-fashioned denial, avoidance and hard-assed impatience simply because I can get things done faster") to stalking ex-lovers, having a lesbian mother, having sex with men, trying to make it as an artist, or discovering the oddities of rural America as she travels, Tomato’s insights and memories are shared with rich prose and vivid language that are poetic, moving, and funny.

She writes magically about urges of wanting to feel white, gay, bisexual, black, heterosexual, Spanish or "a broken hearted Puerto Rican." From cowboys to nuns, from shaving eyebrows to being deserted by her father, Lopez covers a lot of territory, and she covers it with great wit and passion. Her best life advice?

1) Don’t talk yourself out of doing anything, except for killing people.

(2) If you’ve hit thirty and are still blaming crap on your parents, you’ve got entirely too much time on your hands.

Does she ever make it to California? Only one way to find out...put this on your MUST READ list now!

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6/27/97 Issue.
Copyright © 1997 by CAMP Rehoboth, Inc. All rights reserved.