This isn't the story I planned to do at all.
The story I planned
to do began: "It was as though the little town was asleep by the
river," and then what happens was supposed to happen the way a flower
unfolds, in a sensitively ordered progression of distinct literary
value, in accordance with my outline, in a tale that ultimately redeems
the common man and proves the strength of his basic beliefs. But this
is nothing like that, goddammit. I can sense a difference already, even
before the first sentence, like a fist forming; that's how fast it can
get out of hand.
I guess it all began when I was a child, when I
first lost my sense of control over things, and, despite my
conventional upbringing and higher authorial ambition, began to imagine
stories involving large breasts, exotic metals, shock waves, body
piercing, radiation, that kind of thing. I wasn't breast-fed, I don't
think; the fact of mammary deprivation may have something to do with
it, but we didn't talk about things like that in my family, so I won't
say any more about it to a readership of complete strangers I'll never
meet in a million years, unless you get in my way.
I'd planned
to put some trees right about here, a lot of trees in fact, very
generous with trees, phony trees, of course, just penmarks on paper or
pulses on pixels after all, who would care, there are no more trees,
all over the imaginary mountains made of mental plastic between me and
you, rich artificially green apparently healthy trees to nature up the
beginning of the pathos with all that hokey hope there used to be, like
in those nice stories they used to write before reality insisted, to
screen me further from your naked gaze, and then before I know it the
scene is an apocalyptic small town parking lot with radioactive parking
meters, I'm sorry, I don't know what's come over me, numbers painted on
the asphalt still bubbling, and the faintly glowing side of a building,
the brick bulged out in the part that's still standing, with what's
left of a dry cleaning advertisement on it photographically reversed,
as it were, by the heat of the blast.
Shit. I'd envisioned a
nice heartwarming story about a family in a small town just like this
one used to be before whatever happened happened, what the hell else am
I gonna get published in this sappy world except a story in a friendly
sort of town where everybody knows everybody else and enough implicit
sex and hidden insanity goes on that an author can disappear in a plot
so simplistic it's completely unlike life, from the time you wake up in
the morning all the way to the grave.
The story was supposed to
take place thirty-forty years ago, maybe some scenes in this very
parking lot, all to do with the struggles of a young couple confronting
pre-apocalyptic change and so on like it used to happen before tv in
the small towns that were soon big malls on their way to worse and then
to here - back when there were trusting neighbors and that kind of
illusory stuff - heartwarming is the word, a soupcon of tragedy in
there somewhere for the pathos we need more than ever nowadays, I mean
true pathos, the kind you have to look backward to get anymore, not the
supermarket or celluloid kind everyone is so fat on all over the place,
and all of a sudden there's this - this - creature Haina screeching to
a stop in a cloud of burnt rubber on a spiked motorcycle as the female
protagonist and succubus of Balshank's alterego's incubus, the
arch-nihilistic agonist Lemuel.
So much for heartwarming. Who
the hell are these people? I don't want to talk about Haina, or any of
them, but inspiration is a razor-sharp blade at my throat. So Haina is
a closely shaven example of all that is best in women who act like men
who are in touch with their inner female on a day-to-day basis, but can
override the bitch when they want to.
At the same time, I feel
that this is getting too far out of hand. I'm sorry. Haina epitomizes
all that is indefinably neutral in the realm of ambition and succor,
but can bend a tire iron with her bare hands while consuming human
flesh if she gets the craving. She is tall and strong, and has big tits
beneath titanium spirals. She is my muse, what can I say.
But on
the other hand, what the hell can I do with her for pathos in a small
eastern town thirty-forty years ago with boilerplate trusting neighbors
and boilerplate implicit sex, so it has to be some protopunk
apocalyptic thing, forget about the trees, I don't know what's with
these spiked leather bracelets and an orange mohawk for color, now I've
put a chrome bolt through my nose.
My name is Balshank. I take
over evergreen smalltown heartwarming bullshit stories and stomp their
preapocalyptic ass into the real thing, fit the times like a studded
glove. Just wait till I get my hands on Haina, that small-town-blasting
plutonium junkie bitch. Then I'll have a fucking story for you, so
don't go away; I need a little bit of tension right about here, and
you're it.
