January 2010 Archives

I was never a huge fan of comic-book superheroes.  Superman, Batman, and the like were as much an enemy to me as the criminals they fought.  They were here to make the world safe for jocks, fascists, and idiots and I hated them for that.  

Admittedly, I did lust after superheroines from time to time though the villainesses were the ones who really floated my boat.  They, like their goody-two-shoes counterparts, were built like brick shithouses but what made them extra hot was that they were unconstrained by some lame definition of what is right, proper, and just.  These women knew how to party.

Much of the appeal of fantasy is that it doesn't have to be something your mother would approve of.  You can stray from the straight and narrow into the world of pure evil and when you're done, you hit the reset button and you're back in the real world as guilt free as when you took your detour.

That explains much of my love for horror comics in my youth.  The best were printed in black and white and were therefore exempt from that holdover from the McCarthy era, the Comics Code Authority.  Good did not have to triumph over evil.  What was meant to triumph was the horror, sometimes in the service of a harsh form of justice, but not always.

In these comics, heads came off.  Often.  I liked that.  I was a kid growing up in a southern California beach town where nothing bad every happened to anybody.  It was only natural for me to crave a little mayhem. 

My friends and I used to swap stories about people who died at Disneyland.  This was long before the internet came along so you could just make stuff up without any fear of fact checking.  I may not have actually believed that some bozo stood up on the Matterhorn, got decapitated, and had his headless body cartwheel and splash down in the submarine ride.  I didn't have to.  The story was gruesome as hell and that was good enough for me.

Well, it is probably more accurate to say it was good enough for the moment.  I needed more.  I wanted stories.  They didn't have to be plausible stories or even good ones. 

A typical plotline in either Eerie or Creepy would be about a guy who gets sick of his wife's nagging he shoots her and dumps her body in the swamp.  That night, the dead wife, dripping with algae and assorted swamp slime, walks in through the front door and eats his face.

What more could a twelve year old ask for?

A few weeks ago, I was in a bookstore in Sacramento and bought three hardcover volumes of Creepy issues from the mid 1960s. The material was about a decade older than the stuff I remember so it was all a fresh read.  The themes, however, were very familiar.  Ghosts and ghouls, vengeance and violence, it was like a reunion with an old friend.

It was also an inspiration.  I often have a hard time coming up with new material for this blog.  The pulp reviews were fun for a while but if I'm going to be showcasing bad fiction, I would prefer it be my own.  Horror stories, especially the kind that exalt in their own cheesiness, seem to be the kind of stuff I can churn out with regularity. 

Oh, don't expect any young-vampires-in-love bullshit.  I don't even like the fanged fops.  If I ever write a vampire story, I'll have the sorry undead bastard dumpster diving for used tampons.

It was a rainy spring morning in 1972.  Leon stood alone at the last stop for the school bus before it turned right on West 5th Street and made the three-mile trip from the beach community of Oxnard Shores to Curran Elementary.

Leon's raincoat looked like a hand-me-down.  It was certainly too big for his four-foot-three frame.  The sleeves hung down past the tips of his fingers and the hood that was pulled up over his head covered nearly his entire face.

The bus driver almost missed stopping for him.  Usually, there were no children waiting there and he would drive on by without a moment's thought.

The bus came to a halt and the door swung open.  As Leon climbed the steps into the vehicle, the driver noticed that something was not quite right.  This schoolboy smelled of cigarettes and bourbon.  What's more, a close under Leo's visor revealed he had five o'clock shadow.

"Wait a second," said the bus driver.  "You're not a kid at all."

Leon pulled back his hood to expose a face that was no less than forty years old.  He then pointed a revolver between the bus driver's eyes.

"Fuck you," Leon said and pulled the trigger, spraying his brains into the laps of identical twins in the front seat with matching dresses and ribbons in their hair.

The twins screamed in terror.  So did the rest of the kids.

"Fuck you too," Leon said.

He opened his raincoat to show he was holding a Thompson submachine gun with a 100-round drum magazine.  He holstered his revolver, leveled the Tommy gun at the children and opened fire.  Little hands and "Brady Bunch" lunchboxes were thrust up in defense but they proved to be a pitiful shield against the deadly hail of bullets.  Those kids who scrambled to escape through windows and the rear door fared no better.

By the time Leon's magazine was empty, there was no more screaming, only a few moans and sobs.  Leon quickly silenced them as well by walking the center aisle of the bus and delivering a finishing shot from his revolver where needed.  In the end, 23 people lay dead.  Among them was Cindy Jacobs, a straight-A student and the odds-on favorite to win the class spelling bee two weeks away.

This was the same bus I rode every day but I was not there that morning.  I was home sick with the flu, blissfully unaware of the horrors that had just transpired.

Almost four decades have passed since the events of that fateful day.  Their only reminder sits on my bedside table.  It is a small plastic trophy with the inscription, "Spelling Bee Winner, Mrs. Silver's Fourth Grade Class."

Not only Cindy Jacobs but every other kid who volunteered to compete in the class spelling be had died on that bus.  I had won by default. 

I was quickly eliminated in the school-wide competition but for the brief period in between, I savored the only taste of victory I would ever know.

There is a business card in my wallet.  It reads: 




If I ever reach that point in my life where I need to feel even more like a winner, I know who I'll be calling again.

"Oh Mother," said Samantha.  "Put away that stick of butter."

"Oh Samantha," said her mother.  "You haven't gone veggie on me, have you?"

"It's 'vegan' Mother, and yes I have."

"Your father wouldn't have liked that, you know."

"Samantha let out a laugh and then stopped herself.  As a child, there were many meatless dinners.  There was no money to buy any because her father had spent it all on liquor.  He would then accuse Samantha and her mother of stealing from him.  One time, he pounded his fist on his puffed-out chest and swore that he, the provider and man of the house, would go out and hunt for meat just like in olden days.  That night, he killed the family dog, cooked it, and forced them to eat it.

This was her father, a man who was frequently unemployed, always abusive, and took far too long to drink himself to death.  His funeral that afternoon had been attended by Samantha, her mother, and a half dozen of his buddies from the bar.  It was from overheard conversation that Samantha learned that her father had a reputation among his pals as a real "pussy hound."

He was, in short, a typical male, perhaps even worse than most.

Samantha poured a cup of peanuts into the saucepan containing water, sugar, salt, and corn syrup.  She then slowly stirred the mix together as it simmered on the stove.

"What are you using instead of butter?" Samantha's mother asked.

"Rapeseed oil."

"Rape seed.  That's fitting.  It was, after all, one of the prime ingredients in your conception.  It's funny.  If I has been more successful fighting your father off, you wouldn't even be here."

Samantha and her mother watched the water slowly boil from the saucepan.  After most of it had evaporated, Samantha stirred in the rapeseed oil and baking soda, and poured the contents on a cooking sheet to cool.

"He used to beat me, you know," said Samantha's mother.

"He used to molest me," said Samantha.  "I think that's worse."

"Yes, but did he beat you?"

"Sometimes."

"He beat me a lot more than sometimes, I can tell you that much."

The two women stood and stared at the steam rising from the molten peanut brittle as it began to congeal and harden on the cookie sheet.  Each passing minute seemed like an eternity.

"I have cancer," Samantha's mother said.

"Me too," said Samantha.  "What kind do you have?"

"Ovarian."

"I have breast cancer.  That's far worse than ovarian."

"Is not."

"Is too."

At that moment, the fabric of the fictive milieu ripped open and out I stepped, brushing fragments of suspended disbelief from my shoulders.

"Who the hell are you?" demanded Samantha's mother.

"Can't you see we're having a women's moment?" added Samantha.

I put my hands on my hips and cleared my throat.

"I am a dissatisfied reader who has Gumby power and is not afraid to use it," I said.  "I have never been a big fan of Ms. Leeks but was content to endure her contrivances, or rather had been until you two came along.  Good God, have you listened to yourselves?  I had no choice but to step into you little story and take matters into my own hands."

I jumped up on the table, straddled the cookie sheet, and began to pull down my pants.  The two women gasped in unison.

"Cool your jets, ladies.  I'm just here to shit on your peanut brittle."

When I squatted down, it dawned on me that my own existence could be nothing more than a work of fiction as well.  Maybe some reader of my story would be just as disgusted with me and use his or her Gumby power to enter my world to dish out a similar form of literary criticism.  But it didn't have to be that way.  Fictional or not, I knew in my heart that I possessed free will.  I could shape my own destiny.  I made a pact with myself to do just that. 

Confident that I was entering a new era of being the best person that I could be, I pinched off a section of bowel movement that hit the hot vegan peanut brittle and sizzled like steak.

I like the picture of a peasant girl on this Russian chocolate-bar wrapper, and not just because she looks like the long-lost child of John Candy.  For one thing, she looks nothing like the sort of kid you'd see on American packaging, a greedy-eyed little bastard with a maniacal grin who puts his love of consuming the product he's advertising above life itself.

With this child, you're not exactly sure what's on her mind.  She could just be off in her own little world.  Children are prone to do that.

That would be nice.

Then again, perhaps her blank stare comes from little mind working overtime trying to process a visual no child should ever have to see.  Like her father bound and gagged while her mother does the horizontal bop with a cossack, Stalinist komissar, or Vladimir Putin, depending on the era.  With a culture and history as rich as Russia's, there are so many to choose from.

Too extreme?  Disturbing?  Foreign?  OK, picture the kid safe and sound in her Amercian suburban home.  Mom and Dad are downstairs watching "American Idol."  The kid walks into the home office, climbs into a desk chair, and starts surfing the internet.  Her mother and father are very responsible parents and installed a filtering program so any attempt to access adult content will redirect the browser to the Disney's Little Mermaid Fun Page.  It's a very sophisticated piece of software but not without its limitations.  It can't know about every objectionable site out there.  It does not know about Poison Spur.

This is a very precocious child, able to read even as a preschooler, but too innocent to know what all those words mean.  She takes in as many words as will fit in her brain and desiring explanations, ventures downstairs.

"Mommy, Daddy, what's a pug room?"

A guy can dream, can't he? 

My old roommate, the late Ralph Ross, once told me a joke about two hikers who encounter a bear and start running for their lives.

"We're never going to outrun this bear," says one guy.

The other guy says, "I don't need to outrun the bear, only you."

There's a valuable lesson to be learned there.  Unfortunately for Ralph, it was just one more piece of wisdom that failed to resonate.  If there was anything that Ralph taught me, it was that "happen" and "occur" are not necessarily synonymous.  Things happened to him all the time but nothing aver occurred to him. 

He found himself on the losing end of life's race to survive and died in 1992.  It is said that a fool and his money are soon parted.  In Ralph's case, the same can be said for a fool and his motorcycle, especially after hitting a guard rail. 

As for me, well, I'm still running.

I sometimes think the world has an annual body-count quota.  The old and weak and the young and stupid fill up most of the coffins.  If you've managed to reach an age where you're somewhere in the middle, survival can be pretty easy.  It can also be pretty dull.

Of course, I'm talking about folks who live in an industrialized nation, have some level of education, and have reasonable job prospects.  That's a pretty small percentage globally but a rather high one for people reading this blog.  In fact, I would be be bold enough to say that the average Poison Spur reader has fewer than ten flies crawling around the edges of his or her mouth at any given moment.

People are able to take the long view and suck up the boredom.  There are more important things to consider.  They have families to raise or other responsibilities outside of work that give their life fulfillment.  And then there are people like me. 

I've always dealt with the specter of life's obligations by running like hell in the other direction.  I'm fully aware that I need to keep working so I don't end up some homeless guy who sits on a bench sporting a ZZ Top beard and shits his pants while begging for money to bankroll his filth.  Other than that, there is not a whole lot I do to justify my existence and that shows in my attitude at work.  In fact, it's safe to say that my level of professionalism at every job I've ever had peaked at the end of the end of the interview.

Oh, I muddle through well enough to not get fired and avoid the sort of hijinks I used to do when working at Dining Commons in college.  For example. I once took a condom out of its wrapper and putting it in the bread warmer, resulting in some freshman finding it melted to the side of her dinner roll.  I'm better behaved than that now. 

However, I have even in the past decade pressed my luck just to make my professional life more challenging.  Massive hangovers were a common occurrence for me although I wouldn't say I used to make it a habit of staying up all all night on drugs and spending the next day on the job and getting paid even though I could barely put a sentence together.  That would be wrong (not to mention illegal) so I wouldn't say I was doing that at all.  And even if I was, I'm too old and decrepit to continue with that level of foolishness.  Not that I would ever do such a thing, mind you.

Nowadays, I'm pretty much just a Walter Mitty miscreant.  In my world of make-believe, disgusting limericks and haikus of my own creation cover the surface of every men's room stall.  I've spotted the CEO's laptop unattended and use his account to send a company-wide email with the message "LET'S FUCK!"  There is a fetal pig floating in the coffee pot.  Fortunately for all concerned, I am content to snicker like Muttley at what shall never be. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to work for some fucking reason or another.

I steered with one hand and held  the other cupped over an eye to keep me from seeing double as I drove.  I had less than a mile to go before I made it home to a warm bed, two kids, and a wife who was willing to give me one more chance.

I came up to a corner and made a left turn onto the quiet residential street where my house was located several blocks away.  I am quite a good driver so I was able to execute the turn with only a mild screech of the tires.  Had I noticed either the stop sign or the police car, it would have been perfect.

The cop pulled me over, got out of his car, and approached mine.  He pointed his flashlight directly in my face and asked me for my license, registration, and proof of insurance.  I managed to gather these with a minimum of fumbling around in the glove box and under the seats.  I handed them to him smiling as wide as I could to show him how cooperative I was   At this point, the cop asked me if I had been drinking.

"Not really," I said.

This was somewhat true, relatively speaking.  While I had in fact just left a bar and indeed alcoholic beverages were consumed, I was nowhere near as intoxicated as I had been on recent nights.  In fact, I was arguably more sober than a week ago when I came to at the wheel with the engine still running, my wife standing outside the driver-side window in her bathrobe with in her arms crossed, wanting to know what possessed me to park on our front lawn.  Yeah, definitely, I was more sober than that.

The cop asked me to step out of the car and told me he was going to give me a field sobriety test.  I was instructed to stand in the middle of the road looking upward with my arms outstretched from my sides.  I did what he wanted, told him it was a piece of cake, and asked if I could please go home now.

The cop said that the test was not over.  He wanted me to touch the tip of my nose with the index finger of my right hand, bending only my elbow and continuing to stare straight up at the sky.  When I tried this, my finger came in contact with the tip of my nose at the exact same moment the street came in contact with the back of my head.

Hitting the pavement like that didn't knock me cold but it did stun me.  As I stood up, I asked the cop if we could make it best two out of three.

He told me I was under arrest for suspicion of driving under the influence.  I pleaded with him to reconsider.  I told him how if I got another DUI, my wife would leave me and take the kids with her.  These kids, I added, loved their father so much they've poured my liquor down the drain and cry when I throw up in the morning.

The cop told me I should have thought of that before I decided to drink and drive.

I believed I was well and truly doomed but then a shot from a high-powered rifle rang out.  The bullet made a rather small hole as it entered one side of the cop's head and a much larger one when it came out the other side.

For a second or two, the cop just stood there with glazed eyes and his lips pursing like he was going to blow me a kiss or something (I still don't know what was supposed to be up with that!)  He then fell forward and lay there deader than if he had never been born.

I waved in the direction of the rooftop where I had seen the muzzle flash.

"Thank you Crosshairs Avenger!" I shouted, but it was too late.  He had already disappeared into the night.  When a man takes it upon himself to protect a city and its citizens from the excesses of overzealous law enforcement, there leaves little time to stick around and listen to people express their gratitude.  But grateful I am and every time another one of his daring exploits is reported in the news, I take heart that there is hope for justice on the streets of this city I call home. 

 

Paula and I had set out from Oakland Saturday afternoon not entirely certain where we wanted to go.  We were thinking maybe Napa or Sonoma.  As we approached the Carquinez Bridge, Paula suggested Sacramento.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around a fairly empty downtown taking pictures of less ugly parts of the state capital, eschewing  the grim bureaucratic edifices near the capital building, each one looking like the DMV writ large. 

Perhaps I'll get photos of those next time if I'm feeling in a dystopian mood, but on this particular Saturday, I was in the mood for prettiness.  Even with a camera as simple as what comes with an iPhone, I was able to create the illusion that I was on the street of a quaint and lovely little town.  All I had to do was point the lens so anything I didn't want to see was out of the field of my field of vision.  It was quite easy really.  Most people live their entire lives that way.

Oh, and to the homeless guy standing in the street with his hand down his pants, undecided whether to start masturbating or keel over dead, thanks for not being in my shot. 

After finishing "Tiny Cancer," I decided to be less ambitious with my follow-up effort.  It was going to be a quick something I was just going to rattle off in my spare time.  I figured I would have it done within a week or two.

I just started on it two days ago.

There were a number of reasons for this.  It was the holiday season.  I've been spending a lot of time with my girlfriend.  I have a job.  So on and so forth.

All of these are valid.  Unfortunately, there was also part of me that felt I deserved to rest on my laurels after completing a ten thousand-plus word story.  I had arrived as a real writer, you see, and needn't concern myself with such mundane tasks as continuing to write.

I blissfully embraced this foolishness until Christmas day.  I was at Paula's apartment, trying to help with dinner preparation but quickly finding out that I was of most use occasionally ferrying items out to the dining-room and mostly staying out of the way.  For the most part, my job was to amuse Paula by reading stories to her from my blog.  Naturally, I was in favor of that.  It beats honest work any day of the week.

As I recited my prose and took sips of wine to keep my voice from cracking, I started noticing passages that could use a little polish, some that needed more serious reworking, and others that just plain sucked.  It's bad enough realizing that you're not as good as you thought you were but a far worse thing when this realization comes to you in front of an audience.

It took me more than a week to gather up enough courage to give it another go.  It may take a while before I can produce any fiction worthy of showing to anyone so in the meantime, expect bits of fluff like this.

I've also become a bit of a shutterbug with my new iPhone so expect more pics as well.  I'll try to refrain from uploading any taken of my own poop (though I may be persuaded to make them available upon request).