Cruising by Pandora Drive

by Tim Waggoner

Close to twenty years ago, my wife and I were still newlyweds, both in graduate school, living in a small apartment, childless and – despite all the studying we had to do and papers we had to write – with plenty of time on our hands.

One afternoon during those newlywed days, we were out driving around the Dayton, Ohio, area with no particular destination in mind. (Given how today I have to drive like Speed Racer on a cocaine and amphetamine cocktail just to get somewhere late, the idea of driving for the fun of it seems nearly unfathomable to me now.) I can’t remember which of us was driving. Probably me since I hate being a passenger and am only truly comfortable in a vehicle if I’m operating it. (Can you say control issues?) As we were driving around, a street sign caught my eye. It said “Pandora Drive.”

I grew up in the country, where most roads are named after families who’d lived in the area since God was a teenager. Mote Road, Emerick Road, Jay Road . . . Serviceable names, but hardly evocative for someone like me, blessed (or cursed, you might say) with an overactive imagination.

But PANDORA DRIVE . . . now there was a street name to conjure with! A story idea popped into my head. What if there was a woman, a Pandora, living on this street? And what if, like her counterpart in Greek myth, she unleashed terrible woes upon her friends and neighbors? But unlike the classical Pandora, the plagues mine would release would come from the repressed fantasies and desires of those who were unfortunate enough to live close to her.

The basic concept was workable, I was sure of that, but there was something missing . . .

Fast forward a couple decades.

Around the time my first daughter was born in the mid-nineties, we lived in a small apartment in Columbus, Ohio. Like so many good-sized cities, what everyone thought of as “Columbus” was really a downtown surrounded by other communities of varying sizes, each with its own name and separate identity. One of these places was called Minerva Park – another evocative name, one reminiscent of PANDORA DRIVE. The cool thing about this community was that earlier in the twentieth century, it had been home to an amusement park. Of course, the park was old and abandoned by now, but the idea that people still lived nearby, that they’d even named the town after the park, fascinated me.

As so often happens when I’m writing, it seemed to me that two ideas – Pandora Drive and Minerva Park – might just be better than one. So I popped them both into the old mental mix-master, hit puree, and viola! PANDORA DRIVE the novel was born.

Fast forward to last summer. In my author photo for LIKE DEATH, I’m wearing the same black jacket that I describe my main character wearing. It was just coincidence. I gave Scott that jacket only because I have a lousy imagination when it comes to real-world details.

It occurred to me that, since PANDORA DRIVE was a real place and that we were once again living in the Dayton area, it might be fun to have the author photo for this novel taken with me standing in front of the street sign. So we loaded our two daughters into our suburban cliché-mobile – a mini-van – and set out in search of a road I hadn’t seen in twenty years. (In case you’re wondering, we also had a ladder in the back to get me high enough so my face would be near the street sign.)

After a twenty-minute drive we reached our destination, and I was absolutely shocked and delighted. For across the street from the very road sign that inspired my book was a carnival: Ferris wheel, moon walk, funnel cakes, the whole deep-fried and outrageously overpriced enchilada. I couldn’t tell what organization – a church perhaps? – was sponsoring the carnival, and I didn’t care. We parked the van and set up the ladder next to the street sign with the carnival clearly visible in the background. I smiled and my wife snapped a few pictures.

Now you tell me: what are the odds of my coming up with a novel idea from a street sign, years later adding an amusement park into the mix, and then, after the novel has been accepted for publication and I’m returning to the street sign for the first time in two decades to have my picture taken, that there should be an honest-to-God carnival across the street?

And people wonder why I write the kind of stuff I do.

A final note. My third Leisure novel, DARKNESS WAKES, will be out in December 2006. I got the idea for it after seeing an unmarked door in a shopping center here in Dayton. Soon, we’re going to drive to the place, I’m going to stand next to the door, and my wife’s going to take another photo of me. Of course, given what lies behind the door in DARKNESS WAKES – and considering what happened when we took the photo for PANDORA DRIVE – maybe I shouldn’t stand too close to that door when I pose for my next author picture.

Just in case.

Click here to read an excerpt.
Click here to buy PANDORA DRIVE!