MFU
by
HC
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
HC on Smashwords
MFU
Copyright © 2010 by HC
This book is available in print at amazon.com
* * * * *
PROLOGUE
1
I was born to hijack space shuttles and blackmail cities and start world neurologic wars. And be kicked out of rooms and institutions and off planets and out of solar systems.
I was born to be the kind of person that intercepts a satellite feed and superimposes flashing titles like "Disingenuous Slimeball," "Mass Murderer," or "Dickhead," over its images of celebrities and world leaders.
And I was even born to be elected President of the Cosmos -- on a platform of "Fuck the Economy! Fuck the People! Fuck the Police!"
2
Or else I wasn't born this way at all, and something must have happened in life itself, to make it this way.
* * * * *
ONE
1
I was born around Big Midnight in a CanaMexican motel where the owners and maids were all so busy either drying out or scoring, that they couldn't be bothered with checking people in or cleaning the rooms.
2
My parents had met at a school or a spa, where young ladies were taught to be proper alcoholics.
They lived on Avenue Zero: home of coffee, toothpaste and vodka -- all at once.
After graduating, they stayed together for a while and, instead of life, decided to have the fucked-up offspring: -- me.
3
My paternal mother belonged to the Benign Fascist Labor Party, and my maternal mother ran a chain of simulation shops that only really existed in the kind of rumor that never got past mouth one.
4
Though I grew up with no control over my own hopeless life, I could sometimes force events in the real world -- earthquakes and fatal illnesses, corporate bankruptcies and stock market crashes, drug czar resignation scandals and mountain road auto accidents, to name just a few. Most, without even being there. Some, without even trying.
* * * * *
TWO
1
I was born in a Sony 797, one day, and my first birthmemory was the sight of the pilot, co-pilot, and crew, out the window, parachuting by.
2
My parents had wanted me to grow up to be one of those people who, by sheer strength of personality, can convince 12 or 15 members of an audience to jam themselves into a small, tight, transparent glass booth, made to hold about 6 adults max, and then lock the door on them and take two ordinary house cats and hold them out for the rest of the audience to see what sweet gentle little kitties they are, then shoot them both up with a long thick syringe of concentrated PCP and drop them into the glass booth and clamp down the lid so there's no exit.
Then join the audience in watching, as the little kitties tense up and gracefully puree the volunteers, with a driving, insect-chainsaw sound.
3
Of course, I didn't grow up to become one of these people and, instead, enrolled full-time at Find-the-Salami University, with a major in cable-phone-software consciousness, and a minor in how even kamikaze last meal design therapy can be abused. My advisor was Professor Our.
4
Things went OK there, for a while, but eventually, junior year, I just lost it one day, in between classes, and headed out for the airport and hijacked a plane that was sitting on the runway, stuffed with passengers, waiting to take off.
Soon, the police came and deployed their snipers and sharpshooters, and through the glass of their makeshift command center, I could see the contract psycho-therapists they'd hired, madly scanning disks of clip-text for the perfect line or word to use to talk me out of it.
5
I got on the radio and tried to be straight with them, at first.
The police negotiator, Captain Our, listened politely to my demands, and then, when I was done, just said, "I'm sorry, but those all seem to violate some fundamental law of physics or other, and can, therefore, simply not be met in this universe, at this time. Even if we wanted to."
I got so pissed at that, I started demanding everything I could think of, whether I cared about it or not -- then, got so guilty, I only asked for softball items, just to let the cops have, at least, some success.
"How about more drugs," I said, into the headset I'd taken off the dead pilot. "Lots more drugs -- if it's not too much trouble. And while you're at it, let's have more colors and deeper darknesses and richer histories and more intelligent timbres and new hi-res emotions from formerly restricted top-secret government databases, with real-time-interactive, cartoon-animal, user interfaces."
6
When that didn't work, I demanded more streets and more cities and more nations and continents and more moons and more space junk. And more words and more subtle explosives and more alphabets and languages and more new categories of self-sacrifice and self-destruction. I was all hyped up. Nothing was enough. Everything bored the piss out of me. Thermonuclear war between Earth and Venus. Mass suicide of entire populations by wall outlet electrocution in bathtub. Golden anal sex with the world. Zarathustra blowjob.
"There has to be more action," I screamed at Captain Our over the hotline between us. "Constant action. Somebody has to get shot or save somebody's life on every street corner, every minute. And every kickoff has to be run back 110 yards for a touchdown, and every basket has to be made from the stands at the opposite end of the court, and every pitch has to be a hit batter who dies on the spot, so both dugouts pour out, and the two teams kill each other, as well as the umpires and fans -- leaving nobody alive.
"Every sound has to be an earthquake or tidal wave that topples governments and changes national boundaries and mutates whole species so they suddenly drift off the planet, across galaxies, only to return, years later, when they can't get a job cause their credit rating's bad or cause they can't do the Mashed Potatoes.
"More space station crack-ups, more cosmic cataclysms, more car crashes at stoplights and intersections. More meteors and satellites and re-entry pods and debris dropping out of the sky, carrying cryptic filthy messages on slim-line videodiscs hidden under a false layer of paint.
"Hundreds of new world leaders installed every day to replace hundreds of old ones ousted by obscene scandals or by lazy 1-man revolutions. 4 new wars starting every day to replace 3 old ones ending. 7 celebrities born each day, replacing 5 murdered, 4 married, 7 dead by natural causes. 9 new songs on the charts every hour, displacing 8 old ones off. 10 new shows launched each day, replacing 11 old ones cancelled after only a week.
"More mid-air collisions and high-altitude rescues and train wrecks and nuclear disasters and droughts and bridge collapses and biologic blackmail and accidental missiles dumped from trainer aircraft.
"When I walk down the street and only 3 or 4 shots are fired at me, I find it hard to stay awake."
* * * * *
THREE
1
I was born in a squadron of intelligent, unmanned, stealth glider-bombers that cruised the earth forever. On-board neuro-digital, idiot-precognitive systems, networked throughout the formation, predicted the weather on a moment-by-moment basis, all over the world, and kept the gliders aloft by using today's best air currents to get to tomorrow's.
Thousands of these squadrons decorated the skies over thousands of different cities at once, giving populations their final taste of awe -- and final reparations for having put up so well with the complex bullshit of being.
2
When I was old enough, and ground-based expert systems indicated that the planet was ready for me, I crawled into the co-pilot's seat and pulled the eject lever, as I'd been trained to do on TV airplane school. Instantly, a precise dance of explosive bolts rocketed the seat and me into space, where, now, suddenly, below, all life lay spread open before me -- like a nymphomaniac.
3
When I landed, there was already a job waiting for me at Company Zero -- a really pissed-off, multi-disciplinary, multi-modal, multi-tasking, multi-sexual, underground, pirate, gypsy, hegemonic, corporate behemoth, that spanned the globe but couldn't be found when someone wanted to arrest its president or make it stop.
It didn't have a comm number or a street address or an ether name. It didn't have a Tax/Security ID or encrypted password logo.
4
I was hired to be one of the many bogus employees of Company Zero, whose only task was to circulate endlessly through the bars and restaurants of a town or city, to give the false impression that our corporate headquarters was somewhere nearby.
In reality, headquarters was randomly relocated many times each month, sometimes to places tucked deep in volcanic mountainsides or to caverns under the sea, where even nuclear explosives couldn't penetrate.
For the non-bogus workers, this meant a new office in a different building or a different city or a different hemisphere or a different world or dimension altogether, every few days.
Appearances, brand name loyalties, friends and families also had to be changed at approximately the same rate.
5
When I was finally asked to leave the Company Zero apprenticeship program, one day, no specific reason was given, other than a "re-thinking of issues of corporate culture," and a "necessary reallocation of resources, based on unexpected fiscal shortfalls. Or something."
6
I immediately joined the Smiling Saint Fascist: Mafia Bitch Project. Its meetings consisted mostly of its chairman complaining that his monkey had a laptop on its back.
When I got home from these meetings, I'd usually learn that a neighbor or roommate had been dismembered and boiled up in a soup and fed to some community group unbeknownst, and they'd all loved it.
7
Then I dialed a wrong number, but the therapist who answered couldn't resist running me through a battery of standardized psychological tests, anyway.
A few hours later, she called back.
"After checking and re-checking and cross-checking your results with all my colleagues and mentors and even my students," she said, "It's clear to me and to everyone else, that what you have is simply an extreme case of being fucked-up -- beyond all reconciliation with time. -- And that's the optimistic assessment."
She told me I'd better do something fast or risk evaporating on contact.
"There is only one place," she said, "That even claims to be able to deal with people like you."
* * * * *
FOUR
1
A week later, I stood at the entry point to an unmarked treatment city maintained by World Rehab, in western Nervada.
A soft orange-yellow glow suffused all space here, where things should have been white or gray -- but it wasn't a new-color sun or just after a brush fire.
A light I didn't know I had, started flickering somewhere inside my head.
They'd built the world's largest electromagnetic mountain next to the city, and once you were cleared for entrance, they turned it on as you passed through.
By the time you reached downtown, it had thoroughly erased all your ugly, stupid memories, and all the pretty ones too, so you were nothing, anymore, but yourself, at the moment.
2
Non-functioning `48 Chevys and `53 Oldsmobiles sat parked along Main Street like bath toys -- their only use, to jump on when you were drunk.
There were few moving cars and fewer people. I suppose, once you've had all your memories blown out, you don't really need Main St. anymore, unless you're new in town.
As I walked past the simulated, boarded-up storefronts, a `54 Buick convertible came cruising slow from behind me -- doin' 4, maybe 5 mph.
"Hey - yo!" a voice called from the driver's seat as the car pulled up alongside me and slowed to my pace, maybe 1 to 1.5 mph.
I mumbled a question I didn't even understand, but it was the only line I knew for people in 50's cars. It was a call for specs, and I thought if I got him talking numbers, maybe he'd never get around to trying to show me his talking baby pictures.
He ran through 18 proprietary gears in a microsecond, as he drove, then reached over and popped open the glove compartment. He took out a stack of owner's manuals and, leaning across the front seat, held them out to me.
I had to walk into the street to get them and I didn't even want them.
"I don't want your fucking service manuals," I said. "I only said what I said cause it's the only question I know. I don't care what the answer is."
He smiled.
"Then you're my kinda organism," he said, pushing open the door for me.
3
We cruised down Main St., and he told me about his days in reform school. I didn't have any memories, so he got to do all the talking. So what!
He reached into the console and pulled a little vial out and held it up to the light that came dead down Main St. thorough his windshield.
"Di-methyl, tri-chloro, Di-hydro-phenylalanine sulfate," he pronounced, phonetically. "The number 1 motivation drug. Outlawed 3 years ago."
We came to a section of the street where makeshift cardboard stalls and tables offered all possible consumer items, but had no customers, and the vendors didn't care.
"The drug," he said, pointing at the bottle and taking his eye off the road long enough to almost hit a line of parked cars, "Works by making you think you're not fundamentally alone in the world. You are, therefore, willing to take great risks to try to kill your friends and loved ones -- knowing full well, they'll be there to save your ass, when you fail."
Without changing expression, he suddenly jammed on the brakes several times, to shake off a panic attack that apparently happened if you drove by these storefronts too slow.
"When it was outlawed," he continued, "I was able to invent a legal placebo that worked exactly like it -- if you believed in it enough when you took it. And I had a backer with deep pockets up the wazoo."
His tone turned somber. "But then, suddenly, just 2 days before full-scale production was to begin, the backer got all wacky -- and had to be tied to a booster rocket and shot into space. Without his cash, all activity on the project stopped immediately, and no one else could be found, willing to bankroll it.
"So I took my $500 advance, bought this old Buick, and have been cruising up and down Main St. ever since, waiting for something to happen. And, right now -- you're it."
* * * * *
FIVE
1
Eventually, I was kicked out of rehab for being either "beyond sickness" or "beyond motivation," and put on the bus for Rabid City, just across the border, in Saudi Antarctica.
I settled down there because it was the only town in the hemisphere that still accepted World Ponzi Markers as legal tender, and that was the only currency I had.
2
The streets of Rabid City were littered with the bodies of people who'd wanted desperately to be mad-dog killers, but had failed miserably at even being mad or at even being dogs.
These people now found themselves in low-level service jobs, ancillary to the mad-dog killer industry, with no hope of advancement. Many had dropped the fantasy altogether and opted for other, less glamorous careers, like hospital investigator or "Fuck Money" facilitator.
3
Despite these losers, this town was still well on its way to being recognized as the Number 1 mad-dog killer town in the world.
Not only did many mad-dog killers grow up and operate out of here, but many up-and-coming mad-dog killers from small towns everywhere, came here to study and make important career contacts.
And many famous mad-dog killers of the past, when you looked into their records years later, turned out to be originally from here, as well, though you'd never have guessed it.
4
This was the kind of town where maybe 1 out of every 20 cars that went by had a muffler.
Every bar in town had a core group of regulars who sat around all day long, bitching about how the only real step up from being an asshole and a loser in this life, was to be lucky enough to be only an asshole or only a loser.
This was the ugliest town in the world -- but all the others were worse. And this was still the best town in the world to be pissed off in.
Hundreds of valiant wars had been fought here, over alleged encroachments on the other guy's sacred piece of dirt.
All the trucks and buses in this town had "Ain't My Planet, I Just Eat Here!" bumper stickers, and all their drivers wore "I Don't Know, And I Don't Wanna Know!" tee-shirts.
In this town, every company was a world company -- but then, in this world, every town was a company town, and in this company, every world was a small-town world.
The only crime here was screaming "Fire!" in a theater when there really was a fire. If you screamed it and there was no fire, or if you released airborne plutonium-producing viruses at the Academy Award Ceremonies, that wasn't a crime.
* * * * *
SIX
1
Under these circumstances, I quickly fell into a bad shit of the head. I was the Chuck Yeager of being fucked-up -- pushing the envelope of despair, where a cigarette is just an excuse to exist.
My days were adventures in slo-mo: waiting for the next angry creditor, the tax service, the courts, World Peoples' Bureau of Investigation, or World Repo to come get me for either being, or not being, enough of a dickhead.
2
But, then, suddenly, before I knew it, this nothing -- this fucking nothing -- this worthless, empty nothing -- this useless, flying absolute shitball nothing -- before I knew it -- it was something.
Then, it was everything.
3
I was given a job where I just had to sit around all day, scanning the skies for a slow-spiraling football that would appear to come out of nowhere.
In reality, this would most likely be a long lost pass, vanished mysteriously, centuries ago, from some busted Hail Mary Play, in the climactic moment of some inter-continental meta-superbowl.
4
I did so well at this, I was promoted to a position where I just had to walk from my apartment to a grocery store, and come back with a box of Twinkies, a bottle of Altdorfers, and a soft-pack of Mitsubishi Lites.
But, to do this, I had to push my way through huge crowds of hunger strikers demonstrating round-the-clock, demanding more prissiness in murder and war.
These demonstrations had been going on for years and occasionally turned violent, with hundreds of lives lost in a single day and thousands of people injured. And many of the participants openly advocating world cognitive collapse.
During this period, I began having a recurrent nightmare. Then I'd wake up and it was just my life, so why worry?
5
All new residents of Rabid City were required to submit a cell or two for DNA analysis, and the genologist who did mine got all excited as soon as she finished.
She came rushing over, beaming with pride and shook my hand vigorously, congratulating me again and again for having both the "savage kamikaze" gene and the "bitter innocence" gene.
"You're a sure bet to win either the Innocent-of-the-Year Award from the International Brotherhood of Kamikazes," she said, "Or the Kamikaze-of-the-Year Award from the Union of Concerned Innocents. And possibly both, and possibly many times over."
But she couldn't tell me how long I'd have to wait, or specifically, who I'd have to blow, before I'd be permitted to receive even prize one.
6
So I quit my job and moved into a universal generic habitat in an automatic survival zone on the outskirts of town, and set in to wait it out, getting by mostly on General Motors Nutrient Bars and Kool Filters.
That was fine for a while, I guess, but then, one day, in the midst of all this, something seemed to snap inside me.
I assumed it was "the Call" -- which I'd seen advertised so much on the covers of matchbooks and, mysteriously, in the flaming heat-shields of returned re-entry pods, once given up for lost -- and, without thinking further, or trying, I suddenly understood what had to be done:
Someone had to bring the near-death experience to the masses, in a lo-cost, recreational, "home" version that anyone could afford.
Simply in the interest of redistributing power and understanding and fun. And, thereby, leveling the so-called "playing field."
7
Until then, only the wealthiest and most famous people could pay the price of or even knew about the Near-Death Experience as a vacation option or weekend hobby.
If my work was successful, the common man would suddenly have access to this technology, and at a most reasonable price point.
And the only real difference would be that my "home" version would have a, roughly, 40% accidental death rate, while the unaffordable version (performed by top medical practitioners in clandestine, ultra-hi-tech facilities), had only about 10% of its superstar clients accidentally receiving the full-death experience.
* * * * *
SEVEN
1
So when that didn't work, I figured I'd better become the most innocent person alive as soon as possible -- and then go out and prove it, day after day, all over the world, country by country, city by city, room by room, one soul at a time.
2
So I started out in Satan's Triangle and, from the first minute I arrived, I was definitely the most innocent person there.
Then I went to Slovo-Czechovskia, where it was between me and one other person.
But, at the end of a week, he came up and admitted that I was much more innocent than he could ever dream of being.
From then on, I could walk into almost any garage or any arena, anywhere in the universe, and when I told its patrons I was the most innocent person they'd ever seen or would ever see, no one dared to disagree.
"And, as an added bonus," I told them, "I'm also the biggest asshole you've ever seen -- and without even trying."
3
As my reputation for innocence spread globally, I was flooded with offers from civic groups who wanted me to come help them set up new TV networks where all the newscasters would have angry, bitter expressions on their faces but, then, always smile inappropriately at the end of each news story about death and destruction.
"I'm sorry," I said to all of them, declining their gracious and stinking offers, "But I'm already too busy doing and being virtually everything there is to do and be -- from Pyro-Humanist to Ego-Socialist to Labor Pan-sexual. From Klepto-Maoist to Nympho-Keynesian to Market Para-maniac."
4
Of course, when I'd finished doing and being all these things, and suddenly needed work, all the old offers were gone, and the only job I could get was designing product warning stickers like:
Do Not Plant Car Bomb In This Car
While Engine Is Still Running
or
Do Not Disconnect This Refrigerator
With Child Still Inside
or
Do Not Release Swarms Of Pissed-
Off Wasps In This Auditorium
During The World Series Or World
Cup Of Lust And Despair.
5
Then I got a job in a store that, instead of selling things people wanted to buy, only sold books and tapes and songs and stories and posters and clothing about things people wanted to buy.
And the bulk of my work there was simply cleaning up the puddles of tears and white goop that casually fell to the floor in long viscous strings from the corners of the patrons' mouths as they stood there, for hours, gawking at cardboard mock-ups of artists' renditions of actual product packaging.
6
Then I got a job at a bookstore that catered only to slimeballs and dickbrains, and the only books we carried were their all-time favorite literary masterworks like Slimeball on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Slimeball Who Came in From the Cold, and Look Homeward, Slimeball, and Sons and Dickbrains, and Bonfire of the Dickbrains, and The One Minute Dickbrain.
7
One day, at work, I overheard Satan crying to herself in the washroom.
"Why is every door always locked to me?" she sobbed, "And then, when I break in anyway, it always wasn't even worth the fucking bother?"
8
Then I got a job writing the form letter apologizing for nuclear missiles which sometimes went a little awry during disposal attempts and accidentally hit and demolished innocent civilian non-targets:
Dear Accidental Victim, [I wrote]
Please excuse this inadvertent nuclear explosion on your premises. You have, of course, our most heartfelt apologies for this mishap which, let me straight out assure you, had absolutely nothing to do with you or with anything you've ever said or done.
As you know, [I continued] accidents like these are unavoidable in our modern world, and the blame does not belong to people like you or to people like me, but no doubt, belongs to software -- over which no one has control and, about which, nothing is understood.
In closing, then, I trust you can feel our sincerity -- if you know what's good for you -- and will please, therefore, get the fuck off our backs and go harass somebody the fuck else.
"Sincerely," etc.
9
Once I'd finished this letter, my employers immediately ran off all the copies they needed, sent them all out, and no longer required my services for anything else.
The next few jobs after that are a blank in my memory, but may well be contained in the rush of images that come to me sometimes, uncontrollably, while I'm awake, and appear to have no relation to anything at all.
If these image streams do not come from forgotten pieces of my life, then they must either be old dreams suddenly remembered for the first time, or else extra-sensory experience of someone else's awful past or future.
10
Then, possibly as a reward or consolation for being so fucked-up, I was hired to run the grinder at the meat market of either ideas or desire -- I forget which.
First day on the job, I learned that the gut-wrenching sounds of bone going through the machine, were all digitally synthesized -- straight from numbers and waveforms -- and that the small, coarse chunks that spewed out the nozzle, were all made of mock-substance.
Second day at work, I learned that the meat market itself was just a front for a multi-function warehouse: all its interior walls were flat panel plasma, which could display absolutely anything, anytime, under program control.
So that any religion could saunter in, at a moment's notice, insert its own disk, reboot the house system, and -- Bang! -- instant holy place of whatever flavor and design.
Then, a few hours later, a paramilitary group could march in and turn the place into a custom supply dump, distributing, for example, tactical biologic placebos, or handheld pseudo-thermonuclear blow guns.
11
When I'd had this job for a while, my supervisor called me on the phone, one day, and asked why I hadn't been to work in 3 months.
When I told her she must have the wrong number, she offered me a different job where all I'd have to do was think back to the beginning of recorded time -- to just before the North American Repartition. But I couldn't accept.
"I just got through linking many geographically disparate pockets of population and infrastructure with high-speed command/control expert-system interactive-hypertext-front-end neural-net fuzzy-logic stackware," I told her, by way of apology, "And, boy, are my arms tired!"
12
One night, I was unable to sleep from all the noise of ancient, illegal, disappeared airliners suddenly reappearing at just that moment in the airspace above me and slamming down into civilian neighborhoods nearby.
I got up, finally, and went out and got so drunk and stoned, that I must have accidentally interviewed for (and landed) a high-powered, high-paying, high-prestige position, crying openly in public places, 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.
This was considered an important function for society, because without it, experts feared, the people might get all wacky and stop asking fundamental questions like "What is this tragic, stupid existence no more than mere vestige of?"
* * * * *
EIGHT
1
Then suddenly, unexpectedly, one morning, the world was restructured in a most natural way -- in accordance with the laws of cable television.
Old nationalities were gently laid aside, and individual nations stopped being about language and culture and historic hatreds and central, holy bodies of lies -- and started being about one highly specific, precisely targeted, life/media product orientation.
In this new world of theme states and tight-focus, monophonic republics, each piece of geography offered its own unique vision, so that, once you figured out what kind of loser you wanted to be, you could choose the appropriate place to go try to be it in, from an extensive list of archetypal, brand-name countries like Court TVica, Comedy Channeliopia, or Sci-Fi Networkovakia.
2
Of course, I'd chosen the Peoples' Republic of the Cartoon Network to be my new homeland, because I assumed that not only its people and government, but also its societal and institutional infrastructures and waste treatment facilities, would all be just like me: cartoons of parodies of their post-reincarnation former selves.
3
For the trip, I bought a reconditioned Alzheimer's GT with the last of my World Ponzi Markers, and swapped a ream of Mitsurola intelligent paper for a case of Exxon-Valdez Full-Spectrum Peanut-Fudge bars.
Then I got on the road.
4
Everything went fine for the first 500,000 miles or so -- a quarter of the way there -- and I had just turned onto the Null Expressway southbound, when, suddenly, the engine began vibrating at the exact resonant frequency of my skeletal system, and I was forced to pull over and roll the car off a cliff -- just to get the feel of it completely out of my bones.
5
I curled up, that first night, in a stand of small bushes on the divider strip, and slept OK, despite the traffic.
I dreamt I wasn't an asshole. Then I woke up. Beside me was a doctorate in Placebo Theory which I must have earned while unconscious.
6
I decided to settle down wherever I was, and rented a place at the edge of a compound, where, at the center, a 50 foot high, 360 degree display-screen showed endless, scratchy video loops of the nation's President, staggering around naked and drunk, outside the Presidential Palace, vomiting and pissing on all the world's sacred symbols, flags, and logos and on the signed, official portraits of all its sacred, holy people and charismatic leaders, spread out there, on the ground, in the rose garden.
And gathered around, in a rowdy mob, all the members of Congress, the cabinet, and the Supreme Court, relentlessly egging her on.
7
Since the place I'd stumbled into was ESPN2istan, the only jobs they had here were in the cleanup trade, and for my first assignment, I was jammed into the back of a pickup truck, one night, with 10 others like myself, and taken to a famous Northwestern lake, now quietly strewn with the body-parts from multiple freak collisions between jet-skiers and water-skiers.
Our task, once we'd cleaned up the water, was to continue on to land, to clean up some hunters who'd been so startled by the screams from the jet-skier/water-skier collisions, that they'd all accidentally shot each other, as well as some people on nearby golf courses, who we cleaned up next.
Then, we had to go cleanup the trails where some joggers had been killed by direct frontal lobe hits from golf balls viciously hooked or sliced by golfers shot dead or wounded at the precise moment of ball-clubhead impact.
And then we had to go cleanup the tennis courts where some frightened joggers had run to try to escape the gunfire but, instead, were killed by the players for disrupting their game, or accidentally hit and killed by a vicious volley off the racket of someone suddenly startled by the deathsounds of racehorses on the way to the track who'd just had their trailers slammed into by nitro-fuelled funny car drivers who'd just spun out of control because they'd been hit by line drives from a baseball game in a nearby stadium where the players had lost their concentration because a fan doing a Heimlich maneuver on his choking wife in the bleachers had failed and the wife fallen over dead, smothering a small child asleep beside her whose despondent parents tried to shoot themselves over this, but kept missing and wound up killing everybody else in the stands, instead.
And, of course, we had to clean all that up too.
8
Instead of returning to a home base, when we were done, our truck stayed constantly on the move, so we'd be guaranteed a running start on whatever the next emergency was.
We were also expected to be on the lookout for situations where trucks carrying used body bags from 12-car smash-ups, had collided with trucks carrying VCRs designed to show tapes of ancient earthquakes to halls full of people who didn't already have their own stories of tragedy and abuse.
We were to report such collision sites to Cleanup Central, but not stop or attempt unauthorized cleanup operations ourselves.
9
In the end, though, despite its romantic image and the glamorous stories told about it by former practitioners, serving in the cleanup trade is really nothing more than just long periods of intense boredom and total disgust, punctuated by brief moments of sheer terror and total disgust.
And in order to forget this, and to help pass all the dead time on the road, we were always trying to come up with The Next Big Thing.
You know, like The Next Big Hit Song, or The Next Big Story, or The Next Big Lie, or Organism, or Level Of Consciousness.
* * * * *
NINE
1
One night, we drove into a new city, where all the lights were on and all the tall abandoned buildings were lit up inside, but the streets were empty, with only a soft desert breeze snaking through.
We'd been put into a laughing sleep, so when the team leaders woke us up, we were fresh, and ready for any job.
Since we didn't know what it would be, we quietly began preparing for all 5 categories of cleanup.
2
We were told to put on our blindfolds, and after a few more miles, the truck stopped, and we were led into a building.
Inside, the blindfolds came off on a once lavish theater, so recently trashed-to-shit, that the debris was still creaking.
The stage was littered with expensively-dressed bodies, and faced an audience of several hundred more in similar attire. Two of the bodies onstage were connected by a thin envelope, half in the right hand of one, half in the left hand of the other, with a little statuette on the floor beside them and, towards the rear of the stage, behind the proceedings, 20 more bodies, neatly collapsed in a fallen-domino pattern.
All my comrades puked uncontrollably at the sight, and had to be led away and consoled, while I was left to clean it up, because, instead of puking, I'd just stood there coldly, and factored it all in to a new unified field theory I was working on at the time, of how, you know, the start of the so-called "universe" was simply the accidental undoing of the once-perfect compression algorithm.
This was the first celebrity massacre, and nobody knew how to handle it. Except me.
3
The owner of the auditorium/slaughterhouse was already on the phone to the managers and agents of the dead celebs, and they didn't know what to do about it either -- other than to quickly rush out and find new look-alike, work-alike replacements for the dearly just-departed.
Meanwhile, the slimy, barely beating heart of the future of world celebrity, quivered naked and exposed, beneath the sharpened, rusty church key of my talents and skills and capabilities and lamenesses and utter fucking lack of any fucking attention span whatsoever.
4
So, first, I went through all the victims' pockets and purses, till I had enough drugs to do the job right.
And, of course, after that, everything is a blank.
5
Whatever I did (details strictly proprietary, of course), when I was done doing it, all bodies had been disposed of without leaving a trace, and the theater was completely cleansed of all hint of human tragedy or pain.
6
Overnight, I'd become the planet's leading authority on the cleanup of celebrity massacres, and my services were in demand everywhere. I was paid vast amounts to simply hang around major events, doing absolutely nothing -- just so I'd be on hand to save everybody's ass if something did happen.
Of course, other workers thoroughly resented me for this, especially the celebs, who found my presence there, nothing less than constant reminder of all the psycho, pissed-off assholes aching to take a shot at them.
Yet they always treated me with the utmost respect and unconditional love -- because they understood the deathblow it could deal to universal culturtainfo, if their sudden, en masse demise weren't rapidly, efficiently, cleaned and covered up.
7
Though I have mostly bitter memories of this period, these are somewhat mitigated by the close personal friendships I had formed with many world-famous and world-revered celebrities, who remained close to me throughout my fucked-up life and who, time and again, helped pull me through some of the most pathetic of human moments, even though they knew I knew they utterly sucked.
* * * * *
TEN
1
But I was growing sick of all this crap and began thinking about going back on the road.
And of course, the perfect person to go back on the road with was Brother Teresa.
2
I'd first met Brother Teresa at a class reunion of people on trial for pioneering the kinds of murders done entirely with data rather than guns.
After she was convicted, she wrote me often from death row -- imploring me to teach her "all the sweet, beautiful things about celebrity cleanup," just as soon as she escaped.
Then, one day, out of the blue, she showed up at my door with the Rolling Stones.
3
She was dressed in generic promotional gear: a cap that said "your logo here," a tee-shirt that said "your company name here," and a pair of jeans that said "your ad here," across the crotch.
We all sat around for a while, watching "Hey, Ninja," and talked through the night, doing vodka implants, and skin-popping angel dust. We had much in common because we already shared the fundamental belief that class is what you do when you're drunk.
4
The next morning, we went over to Brother Teresa's place on the outskirts of Hypercity-6, where she'd shot her girlfriend through the stomach one day, but that had only brought them closer together.
We got a little drunk and went downtown, where famous actors always seemed to leave their simulated Ford Broncos double-parked outside unfashionable restaurants, while they ran in and pretended to look for a recent friend, beneath them socially, who they were "just trying to help."
When the night was over, rather than go back to our respective lives of stupidity and despair, we stole a car and decided to get directly on the road, before it was too late.
If we did nothing else, out there, we knew we'd at least be able to help other, less fortunate people who were on the road for the first time and, thus, might be in serious danger of falling off it and being hurt.
With our experience and knowledge, we could probably catch them just before they hit the ground. Which, I guess, would sort of make us the catchers on the road, or something.
5
Once we actually got on the road, everything was just the way they'd described it in road books and road movies and road songs and road videos and road CD-ROMs -- except for all the fucking pop stars.
These obnoxious assholes were everywhere, and once they sensed you were on the road, they wouldn't leave you alone.
They'd come up to you, stopped at a light or at a gas station, screaming, "Why aren't you staring at me?" and force you to take their autographed photos and candid snapshots of their families being arraigned. Then they'd start rambling on and on about their 6-picture, 4-magazine, 8-greeting card, 3-theme park, 5-album deals, and promotional tour tie-ins up the wazoo, and how Ennio Morricone or Sly and Robbie were gonna do their personalized doorbell ring, just as soon as they got back from vacationing in Tonga or the south of France.
6
When we reached the desert, Brother Teresa took the wheel and drove all night, while I slept, and then I drove all morning and afternoon and night, while she slept.
I had the radio on, as I drove, even though the only station that came in was just a 24-hour loop of the local #1 song, ".357 From the Heart," over and over again.
I passed the time by playing the game where you see how fast and how far you can drive on a single blood rush, with your eyes closed and both hands off the wheel.
7
After a while, the radio started picking up a popular show on the Get-Out-of-the-World Satellite Network, and its professional MC voice seemed to mesh, in unexpected ways, with the Alzheimer's gentle roll across the desert night.
"Alright, contestant number 2," the MC voice introduced, "It says here that you're a broken, bitter person, and your hobbies are serial murder and turning lights on and off till the bulb blows or a switch breaks."
"That's right, Vinnie," the contestant voice said. He sounded like something out of some sit-rag where the only emotions are rage, lust and irony.
"And I understand," Vinnie continued, "That all the pejorative adjectives have your name on them."
"So what!" the contestant snapped, getting a little pissed. "Let's get on with the show."
Suddenly the reception dropped off, and I felt a shot of desert
fever. There was no longer any highway. Just an endless, wide stretch of dense hardpack, where direction itself was the only road, and information the only energy that mattered.
8
Eventually, the pure desert turned back into scrub country, and the radio came back on in random bursts of language fragments and audience applause. Everyone on the show had lost, and the consolation prizes were being awarded.
9
Around Fort Tamboo, we pulled off the dirt path and headed up a little bank of dust. Below were some tracks on a low sandstone cliff that ran along about 100 feet above the beach. A narrow ramp, parallel to the cliffs, let you pull up alongside the train, match its speed, and then, sail off the top and land on the flatcar or in the open boxcar of your choice, if you were lucky.
10
Our first night on the train, we were joined in the dining car by a group of triathletes. They gracefully punctuated our stories of lameness and despair with their own dark tales of genetically-engineered bicycle shoes and satellite-activated neural-net running-gloves.
Huge racks of cows and pigs were wheeled in for them and the train had to keep stopping to take on more food and milk. 6 foot long loaves of French bread were scarfed down in a single gulp, like a peanut.
Each triathlete wore an LED headband that publicly displayed his current physiologic parameters, updated each second, and including net worth and humanity, all measured in BTUs.
Whenever their conversation started to lag, it could always get livened up, in an instant, by somebody pointing at somebody else's numbers and calling him a metabolic loser or just a plain, old, metabolic piece of shit. Then laughing uncontrollably till the loser stormed off and did 50,000 laps of the entire freight train -- out of pure, old, metabolic angst.
11
After a few more days of this, we got back in the Alzheimer's and drove off the flatcar onto an exit ramp and headed for the nearest town. We only had another million and a half miles to go, but the car kept driving into the roadway, instead of on it and, as seems to repeatedly be the case with this brand, had to be abandoned.
* * * * *
ELEVEN
1
We walked a ways, through a field of hung over sunflowers and dried corn stalks, and eventually wound up in downtown Infanta City, where they'd just finished fighting the 3-Letter-Word War.
The minute it was over, millions of people took to the streets and started celebrating all kinds of random, illogical, inappropriate holidays.
Holidays like "Dissolution of the World Celebration Commission Day," or "Ethnic Hatreds Re-affirmation Day," or "Just Plain Dirt Day."
But this only stressed them out even more, till they all got so pissed, they almost started the 2-Letter-Word War -- which, of course, would've just been endless streams of 2-letter invectives like GO! BE! DO! HA! NO! US! and SO?! flung with the most virulent sounds, gestures, and facial expressions by members of each side at members of the other.
2
A few days after we arrived, Brother Teresa was shot on sight for some old, leftover, unpunished crime without a name.
The Shoot-On-Sight Authorization had classified it as "Contempt of X; where X is any institution, species, or time of day."
3
I rented an apartment nearby, and shortly after I'd moved in, found the following message scratched into the underside of one of the kitchen chairs with probably a strong pin or fork prong:
Dearest Satan,
I last sent you a letter dated May 3, requesting that you cease and desist in the specific instance of my personal pain, and seeking confirmation of same.
But, to date, I have received no response whatsoever from you or from anyone in your office. Moreover, based upon my most recent review of my fucking, you know, pain, I have noticed that it, you know, continues.
As I informed you in my last letter, such unauthorized and inappropriate use of power is (in addition to being entirely unauthorized and inappropriate) a violation of federal trademark law.
Please respond within ten (10) days to confirm that you will cease your violation. If you refuse to do so, then, I will consider either appropriate legal action, or eating your whole fucking cosmos and the horse it rode in on.
-- Yours, etc.
4
When my landlord tried to collect the rent, I pointed at the message on the chair and said, "You can't make somebody pay to live in a place that has that written in it! You should be paying me!" But, in truth, if the message hadn't already been there, I'm sure I would have wound up scratching it in verbatim, myself, in just a week or two.
5
My day job was with the Center for Navel Analysis, and in the evenings and nights and on weekends and during vacations and lunch and coffee breaks, I worked on writing the runaway, international best-seller, "More Drugs, Please."
As soon as it was released, it attracted many avid readers and fans who flocked to my seminars and book-signings. These people felt great sympathy for me and were always trying to fulfill my impossible drug needs via air-mail or by driving up and dropping stuff off, right at my doorstep, in the middle of the night.
But despite all this, I still couldn't get enough drugs or the right drugs or strong enough drugs or the right combinations of drugs in order to be able to have a single waking moment when my only request was not: "More drugs, please!!"
6
It got so bad, I started trying to fulfill desires I didn't even have. I went and hung around at the finish lines of AAU-sponsored 1000-meter dashes, where you could always grab one of the runners coming off the line at the end of the race, so exhausted and out of it, she falls into the first available arms without checking to see whose they are, until someone else from her team, or one of the coaches, comes and grabs her and chases you away.
7
One day, when I didn't know whether I was in the Witness Protection Program or aboard the Lunar Landing Module, circling a moon of Pluto, I figured that, whichever was the case, I'd better get immediately the fuck out of it, and get serious about my fucking life. Things were slipping by, and if I didn't grab on to something fast, I'd risk becoming one of those people who just hadn't, you know, grabbed on to something fast.
8
Hoping to put something together, I got myself arrested and released on either Hannibal Lecter's recognizance or Reagan's (I forget which), and stopped doing press conferences altogether, and just crawled into a little sack of wheat and hid there and stopped doing drugs.
The press kept clamoring for more information and interviews and photo-ops and televised debates, and some top martial arts instructors kept calling me up, trying to get more self-improvement tips out of me, as well as the ancient secrets of one-finger murder.
But I was really too fucked-up, this time, to do anything for any of them.
9
I had the library of my complete works with me, on a smart-card, and I sat there and re-watched all the movies I'd scripted and all the ones I'd starred in and all the ones I'd only directed or line-produced. Then I read all the books I'd written, and while I was reading, I had all the songs I'd composed and arranged and sung, playing in the background, over the speaker system.
Of course, all my patent applications were there too, and I skimmed through those as well, occasionally stopping to re-work a wiring diagram or re-write a line of code.
I took out my 5 Olympic Gold Medals for Fucking Up and put them all around my neck -- but couldn't ignore that all I'd ever really done to win them was just jive harder than anyone else in the show.
I'd never really felt the way the judges thought I felt, or did the things they claimed I did.
But, I guess, if your stories are horrid enough, even sadists and slimeballs will be too embarrassed to check them out, and would much rather, instead, just give you an automatic "10" for that event, and move on.
10
Then I swallowed a transmitting endo-camcorder that beamed its signal directly to the satellite, so the whole world could see as deeply into me as it was possible to see -- with no censorship or post-processing or time-delay.
But even as they watched, in awe of my boldness and reckless honesty, everybody in the world still knew what a load of shit it all was.
Cause, no matter how deep you went, or how technologic you got, there was just no escaping the lock that neural structures and molecules had on the possibilities of understanding and being.
And stories and myth, of course, were just the face of this chemical lock, projected into symbol space.
11
Eventually, I saw how badly I was drifting and how much I needed to simply get back to my gameplan. "OK," I said, "So where's my fucking gameplan?" And I started throwing papers around and ransacking drawers, looking for it.
A few hours later, when I still hadn't found it, I was forced to admit that, well, maybe there was no fucking gameplan -- and maybe I'd already dreamed up and perfectly executed all possible gameplans -- years ago -- and each had only left me more fucking nowhere than the one before.
12
So what, I thought, and out of spite or love (I can't remember which) I sat down and invented human consciousness -- just to show everybody how fucking pissed off it was possible to be, even in today's gentle world.
13
Then, when it was done, I launched the ad campaign, which went, simply:
CONSCIOUSNESS:
IT WORKS!!
And the rest is history.
14
But who cares?
I was still fucked for life -- and for several afterlives and incarnations far into the future and past, and across all galaxies and dimensions.
And though I'd come here thinking maybe it'd be a whole new ballgame -- I was leaving, knowing it'd been, instead, just a few scattered innings of foul balls, balks and infield fly rule calls -- ending in mutual forfeit.
* * * * *
TWELVE
1
I had grown up in a wretched scumhole -- starving, naked, alone, covered with excrement, raised by pigeons, desperate, anxious, constantly depressed.
So when the crisis of world hopelessness gripped mankind, threatening even the subtle dominance of bureaucratic placebos and peer group sanctimonies, I became, immediately, everybody's first choice to head the new World Peoples' Council, that was set up to try to fix it.
2
To make sure I couldn't refuse this call to service, the most secret and supreme power brokers of the ruling world cabals, all came crawling naked across fields of broken glass and land mines, to beg me to please, please take over their wet dishtowel of leadership and non-stop, platinum showers of ego and love.
3
But I was just a little too busy, at the time, dealing with, you know, all my own personal bullshit and didn't really give a flying fuck about the plight of their pukeball world population run amok.
"Ain't my fuckin' planet!" I said, in response to their endless, whining appeals -- only hinting at how I really felt.
4
But they persisted, because they knew I was their only hope.
All their sharp, slick, well-trained, caring, highly-skilled, tireless, hardworking, personable, brilliant, driven, insightful, powerful, charismatic professional people had already stepped up to the crisis -- and failed miserably, only making everything worse with each attempt.
It was clear to everybody, by now, that they needed someone more fucked-up than life itself, in order to actually solve the problems of life itself.
Someone so fucked-up, she'd brazenly drive around town all day with an "I'd rather be cleaning up some ancient nuclear accident on the South Side of Jupiter than be driving round this fucking town" bumper sticker, taped to the windshield, across her line of sight.
Somebody capable of going to war at the mere mention of the state bird of the country whose dominant ideology maintained that the pen is mightier than the cigarette, and that the bong is mightier than the sword.
5
Eventually, they wore me down, and I grudgingly accepted their pitiful offer.
Obviously, I could have asked for, and gotten, much more -- but I was not in this for fame and power and ego and sex and wealth and control of the universe. I was in this strictly in the hope of dying at it -- in a most stupid and fundamental way.
6
I was installed as Presidente Supremo or whatever, and my first act was to make the entire population of the world learn, by heart, all the songs I'd written during my many incarcerations and (failed) rehabilitations.
Though there were hundreds of these songs, each was highly focused and highly thematic and, together, they laid out my program for saving the huddled, humbled masses of mankind -- so if they learned them now, they wouldn't have to ask questions later.
Then I passed the Universal Education Reform Act, so that every child, regardless of class, would be taught the story about the bats and the hornets, rather than the old wives' tale about the birds and the mosquitoes.
Then I gave every nation 100 new colonies, distributed randomly in tiny pockets across all continents and latitudes. 50 with pre-ordained usages like: simulation colony, test colony, writers' colony, plumbers' colony, space cadets' colony, etc. And 50 that could be anything.
Then I de-partitioned Central North America and re-established a homeland there for all the refugee Americans scattered around the world, living under the guise of another race. A place where they could return and simply live, with no questions asked, and no longer be shot on sight.
Then, I instructed World Peoples' Police to cease all harassment of adults riding over bridges, hanging out their car windows, pounding on their car doors, screaming, "Earthquake! Earthquake! -- C'mon! C'mon! Earthquake!"
I made everybody carry a home drug testing unit that had to show positive for the other person, before any interaction could take place between them.