Boy Wonder (novel)

Boy Wonder is a novel by James Robert Baker published in 1988. The novel is a mock of oral history of Los Angeles, California in which we hear the life of Hollywood avant-garde film producer Shark Trager.

Orange County, California 1950: GALE 'SHARK' TRAGER is born to long-suffering WINNIE TRAGER in the backseat of her car at a drive-in. Shark's arch-conservative father MAC TRAGER (who looks uncannily like actor Glenn Ford) learns the news and ends up running someone off the road on his way to the hospital. Shark immediately is a strange kid, suffering from childhood obesity and not helped by the fact that Winnie is a hypochondriac and Mac is a racist bully. When Winnie grows catatonic, Mac brings in sexy GLADYS FRAZER to take over the wife/mother role in the family. Shark grows up, making friends with gay neighbor KENNY ROBERTS, acne-ridden misfit PUS JENKINS and intellect ELLIOT BERNSTEIN. Winnie dies after climbing into an active freezer and Gladys leaves Mac soon after as the neighbors shun her for being a homewrecker.

As Shark grows up, he falls in love with the movies—his only escape from the bleakness of his own sad childhood—and he becomes an insatiable cinemaphile. Mac’s sister LORNA moves in to help Mac raise Shark, but spends her nights fending off Mac's lonely drunken advances. In high school, Shark loses his baby fat and matures into a rakishly handsome young man who strongly resembles Errol Flynn. One day while working at his father's gas station, Shark notices beautiful blonde California teen KATHY PETRO for the first time and he’s instantly smitten with her. Kathy is the daughter of powerful local oil magnate JACK PETRO, but everyone at school frowns upon Shark, so Kathy doesn’t give him the time of day. Obsessed with Kathy, Shark takes a movie camera over to her house one night and films her from outside her bathroom window as she masturbates. When Shark tries to get the film developed, he’s arrested and Kathy’s parents soon learn what a pervert Shark is. Mac freaks out, taking away all of Shark’s film equipment as punishment. Shark’s relationship with his father only worsens after Shark starts dating an adorable Japanese girl named JUDY OSHIMA. When Mac orders Shark to drop his pants for a VD 'drip check,' Shark accuses the old man of being a homo; Mac is thunderstruck by this accusation—possibly because it's true? Another incident occurs when Kathy Petro makes out with a boy in the local movie theater and Shark, sitting jealously in the seat behind, accosts them. Unfortunately, Shark’s girlfriend Judy dies when her moped is struck on the highway. Shark soon gains another friend, easy-going WOODY HAZZARD, a local surfer and small-time drug dealer whom Shark moves in with.

One day Kathy Petro shows up, trying to buy some acid for her boyfriend, JEFF STUBEN; she gets it, but when Jeff has a bad trip and accidentally cuts his own head off with a chainsaw, the cops storm Shark and Woody’s place. Shark swallows all the acid and has a bad trip himself in jail. Shark decides to go to film school at UCLA and meets the sensitive and talented NEAL RIDGES, as well as sophisticated SIMONE GATANE. Shark moves into James Dean’s old house in the valley and he and Simone start hooking up as he makes his maiden film, "PILLOW FUCK", a wry deconstruction of those insipid 1960s Rock Hudson/Doris Day romantic-comedies. The film is notoriously good and Shark's personal hero, famous French director JEAN-CLAUDE CITROEN, shows up for a screening. Unfortunately Citroen utterly trashes the film afterward and Shark is so devastated that he takes off and burns the only print. Soon after, Shark is living with a gung-ho nut named DRAKE BREWSTER who helps Shark lose weight again and get a security job in Santa Barbara. Shark gets a hold of a graduate student’s screenplay and contacts fellow UCLA film student, SUE SCHLOCKMANN, whose father is a low-budget film distributor in Hollywood. Shark pumps up his relationship with Sue and gets her father to give him a producing deal. To everyone’s surprise, "SEX KILL A GO-GO" is a huge success. When the draft board calls Shark in, he forces himself to ejaculate on the guy in line in front of him to get out of the draft. When Sue notices Shark’s infatuation with Kathy Petro, she tries to distance herself from him, but Shark proposes and the two get married instead. Elliot Bernstein, who originally dated Sue and still loves her, is devastated.