Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Hi! I’m Brian Gerard (Lewandowski). You may know that already.
I just wrote a satirical novel about government conspiracy called Truth Tastes Like Pennies. It’s finished. The novel is ready to go out in the world now (Yes, agents, I am looking at you), unsupervised, like a toddler with a Sharpie, a grievance, and access to a wall that someone just painted.
It’s about a janitor who discovers something he shouldn’t, a government program named by someone who clearly peaked in marketing years earlier, and two river otters who are (and I cannot stress this enough) absolutely not just otters. One of them makes eye contact as if filing a complaint. The other one does math. Not cute math. Not “oh look, it pushed the ball toward the bigger number” math. The kind of math that suggests someone owes it an explanation and possibly a lawyer. For the record, real otters are already unnervingly intelligent. I just gave mine a government budget and a grudge.
(If you came here looking for cozy, I admire your optimism. I have a pamphlet for that. It’s someone else’s pamphlet. My book has federal charges in it. And otters. The otters are not the cozy part.)
The Janitor
Timothy Splashinski mops floors at Happy Waves Aquarium in Millfield, Ohio. Night shift. Alone. Just him, a mop, a radio that only picks up Christian rock and static, and the growing suspicion that two of the river otters are conscious.
Not clever. Not “wow, they’re so smart for animals.” Conscious. Looking at him through the glass with the unmistakable expression of something that knows it’s being looked at and has decided you’re not impressive.
Timothy has notebooks. Three years of them. Meticulous, obsessive, slightly unhinged documentation that something is very wrong inside that tank. He’s brought this to management. Management responded the way management always responds to janitors with theories: by treating him like a malfunctioning vending machine. Have you tried unplugging yourself, Timothy? Have you tried being someone whose opinions we’re contractually obligated to hear? The bathroom on the second floor needs restocking, Timothy. That’s your job, Timothy. The otters are fine, Timothy. Go away, Timothy.
I wrote Timothy because I’ve been the guy nobody listens to. Not about otters. Smaller things. But the feeling is identical: you see something obviously wrong, the system looks at your badge, decides you don’t have the clearance to be correct, and goes back to its sandwich. The sandwich is more credentialed than you are. The sandwich went to Cornell.
The mop is the boundary. Stay behind it and nobody asks you questions. More importantly, nobody has to answer any of them. The mop is a social contract, and Timothy broke it by paying attention, which, in any institution, is the one unforgivable sin. You can steal. You can lie. And, you can microwave fish in the break room. But God help you if you notice something, because then someone has to do paperwork, and paperwork is the only thing a bureaucracy truly considers a crime against itself. (I wrote a whole essay about what happens when you notice an ethical problem and act on it. Spoiler: the bridge doesn’t thank you.)
The Soldier
Then Brandy Mannschaft shows up.
Brandy is a medically discharged Army officer who’s spent sixteen years building a case against a classified DOD program she can’t name in public without catching a felony like it’s a bouquet at a wedding nobody wanted to attend. She has binders. She has binders about her binders. And she has a filing system that would make the Library of Congress feel personally attacked, then quietly reorganize itself out of shame.
Sixteen years. That’s longer than most marriages, most careers, and most government programs last before someone renames them to dodge an audit. Brandy has spent all of that time collecting documents, following dead ends, and cultivating the specific kind of patience that only exists in someone too angry to quit and too organized to get caught. She’s not paranoid. Paranoid people make mistakes. Brandy makes folders.
She doesn’t need Timothy to believe her. She needs his notebooks. Three years of evidence nobody took seriously because the guy who collected it smells like floor wax and has no letters after his name unless you count the “X” on his bowling shirt.
Timothy needs something simpler. He needs one human being to look him in the eye and say: “You’re not cuckoo.”
Brandy does. Then she tells him why he’s not loco. Then Timothy wishes he were nutty, because it would be easier than this, and nuttiness comes with a blanket and someone who asks how you’re feeling. This comes with redacted documents and the dawning suspicion that the aquarium gift shop is a front for something that doesn’t sell keychains. Most funny novels about government programs start here: the moment the protagonist realizes the paperwork is load-bearing.
The Marine
Trout Bowman is a retired Marine with synesthesia. Senses cross-wired so thoroughly that car horns show up as bruised plum rectangles and rosemary tastes like C-sharp minor. If that sounds made up, it’s a real neurological condition and Stanford has a whole research program on it. I just took it and made it useful to the plot, which is more than the DOD did for Trout’s nervous system. Every good piece of satirical fiction about a military cover-up needs a character the machine can’t fool. Trout is that character. His disability is his credential.
He carries a beaten-up camcorder everywhere and films everything at knee-height because he read somewhere that the truth is always at ground level. His footage is 90% shoes and pavement, 10% the kind of thing that gets you subpoenaed.
“Retired Marine” is the DOD’s customer-service synonym for “we ran your nervous system through a paper shredder because the shredder had funding and your nervous system didn’t have a lobbyist.”
Trout can taste lies. They taste like pennies. Sharp, metallic, and cheap. Like the government bought truth in bulk, marked it up, and kept the receipt for tax purposes. He once tasted a press release that made his fillings hum. A recruitment brochure gave him a nosebleed. A DOD mission statement tasted like licking a car battery wrapped in a Terms of Service agreement, which, if you think about it, is the most honest review the Department of Defense has ever received.
Everything about Happy Waves tastes like pennies. The branding. The smiling dolphin logos. The guided tours. The gift shop. The fact that a night janitor filed report after report about otter behavior and not one of them generated a response longer than “thank you for your concern,” which is corporate for “please stop talking forever.”
Pennies. All of it. Pennies and burnt hair and the unmistakable flavor of a system that’s hiding something expensive behind something cheerful, the way a strip mall hides a check-cashing place behind a yoga studio. We all do this, by the way. We all brand our own disasters into something presentable. I wrote about that too, in a piece about Las Vegas and the lies we tell ourselves. The difference is that the DOD has a bigger marketing budget and worse consequences.
The Part Where Everything Goes Bloopy
Timothy, Brandy, and Trout break into Happy Waves Aquarium to rescue the otters.
They are arrested immediately.
Not “eventually.” Not “after a daring escape.” And not “following a tense standoff in the seahorse exhibit.” Immediately.Like the arrest was catered. Like someone had pre-filled the paperwork and just needed the date. Like the handcuffs had been warming up backstage, stretching, doing vocal exercises, waiting for their cue.
The DOD has been watching. For nine months. They were letting Timothy scribble in his notebooks. Letting Brandy assemble her binders. Letting Trout film shoes and taste pennies and do whatever it is Trout does that makes federal agents mildly uncomfortable and deeply confused. Because the system doesn’t need to stop you from finding the truth. It just needs to wait until you do something with it, then reclassify your courage as a felony and your evidence as a national security threat.
Three people tried to rescue two otters and ended up facing charges that sound like they belong in a Tom Clancy novel if Tom Clancy had a sense of humor and a deeper interest in mustelids. This is dark satire about government secrets, except the secrets have whiskers and the satire has a body count.
What happens next is worse. Significantly worse. “Worse” in the way that a small kitchen fire is worse when someone tells you what’s in the basement. And the attic. And also the walls.
I’m not going to tell you what’s in the basement.
That’s what the book is for.
Why I Wrote This
I wrote Truth Tastes Like Pennies because the scariest thing I can imagine isn’t a monster. It’s a system that works exactly as designed and still produces a body count, and the body count has a filing system, and the filing system has a friendly logo, and the logo has a smiling dolphin on it, and the dolphin isn’t real, but the consequences absolutely are. If that makes this a humorous conspiracy novel, fine. I’d call it a horror novel that happens to be funny because the alternative was screaming into a pillow until the pig called 911.
I wrote it at a kitchen table in Virginia while the pig named Trouble McFussbucket judged me, and a chihuahua named Señor Hector “Queso” Suarez DDS contributed nothing. Not a sentence. Not an idea. Nope, not even moral support. He licked his own foot for forty minutes and then fell asleep on a tax document. He is, in many ways, my most honest collaborator.
If you want to see what happens when I’m not writing about otters and government conspiracies, I also wrote The 10-Items-or-Less Apocalypse, a collection of essays where a shopping cart becomes a philosophical monument and a mouse stages a corporate coup. And Slop and Swill from a Festering Mind, which is exactly what it sounds like, and bookstores have checked on my well-being because of it. You can find all of my books on my Goodreads author page, where critics have called my work “aggressively adequate,” which I’m taking as a compliment.
The book is finished. The system is not. If you’re looking for satirical books in 2026 that don’t flinch, this is the one. It flinches at nothing. I flinch constantly. That’s the arrangement.
Visit bglewandowski.com often. Bring a penny. Bring a sense of humor. And if you see an otter that looks like it’s calculating your mortgage, don’t tap the glass.
Nobody listens to janitors.
Maybe you should.
Key Takeaways
- Brian Gerard’s satirical novel about government conspiracy, Truth Tastes Like Pennies, explores themes of overlooked truths and absurd bureaucracies.
- The story follows Timothy, a janitor who suspects the river otters at the aquarium are conscious, and teams up with Brandy, a disgraced officer, and Trout, a retired Marine with synesthesia.
- The novel humorously critiques a system that often dismisses truth-tellers, with engaging characters facing absurd consequences for seeking answers.
- Gerard emphasizes the importance of listening to those often ignored, like janitors, and highlights the absurdity of a system that masks its failures with a friendly facade.
See my Amazon author page.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos. He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- When God Closes a Door, He Needs to Go Get Some Paprika - March 5, 2026
- Monkey Testicles, Missing Documents, and the Eternal Quest to Stay on Top - March 3, 2026
- Under the Blood Worm Moon, Nobody Has to Learn Anything - March 3, 2026
