Ordinary People Need Not Apply

Bob Garfield wants us to know right off that the folks who intrigue him bear no resemblance--none--to those whose idea of the good life is a lifelong job at the local plant, marriage to the high school sweetheart, 2.1 kids, bowling league and PTA.

For a dozen years, Garfield, a journalist and roving correspondent for National Public Radio, has traversed America, visiting 46 states in quest of “bizarre Americana.” His essays have now been compiled as “Waking Up Screaming From the American Dream” (Scribner). In Las Vegas we meet a dental surgeon / country singer; in Florida, an entrepreneur who freeze-dries deceased pets.

Garfield takes us to Fort Wayne, Ind.--home of the world’s largest collection of potato chips shaped like famous faces--and to the heart of the Bible Belt to visit the American Atheist Museum. He has a particular fondness for those who “pursue the hell out of happiness,” all the while “utterly blind to the failures destined to unfold before them.”

Among those failures: a Bronx school bus driver who sinks his savings into his invention, Speakeasies, which are little germ-proof covers to slip over the mouthpieces of those filthy public phones; and a young entrepreneur who launches the Bathroom Journal, the magazine “for people who value their time.”

We also meet the just plain eccentric--a septuagenarian podiatrist from Miami hellbent on telling the world that shoes cause cancer. (It has something to do with body alignment.) And a law professor who claims to have the world’s largest collection of hotel soaps. How else, he asks, “would you remember when you were in a Ramada Inn in East Hanover, N.J.?”

We join the creative minds planning to launch a Liberace memorial TV record offer even as they were joining the Liberace death watch. The anticipation was palpable. “We had the Beach Boys when Dennis Wilson went into the drink,” one VIP gushes--and that group immediately went gold.

We visit caterer “Mr. Omelette,” who claims to “think like an egg.” We meet a 700-pound pig named Jeffrey Jerome--a pig who at Halloween dons a cape and becomes a “vampig.” Then there’s Katrina, the “talking” cat who’s trying to get a gig on a cat-food commercial.

Poking a little gentle fun at himself, Garfield describes how he didn’t win fame and fortune with his deep-sixed TV game / talk show. And he describes his love-hate relationship with his historic Virginia house, which he describes as “ ‘This Old House’ meets ‘The Amityville Horror’ meets ‘The Money Pit.’ ”