Because The Wrath of Khan kicks its ass in just about every way except action and special effects. The action sequences and special effects in Into Darkness make Wrath of Khan look like a play put on by Our Gang to raise money to save someone’s farm. In every other way, though, Wrath wins. It kicks Into Darkness’ ass in terms of story, dialogue, the comfort zone of the characters, and, most importantly, in terms of the villain character. Here there be spoilers, so if you fear spoilers, run.

Khan. Khan Noonien Singh is the bad guy in both The Wrath of Khan and Into Darkness, surprise! J. J. Abrams was really smart to engineer an alternate timeline thingy for these reboots, because it allows him to plunder the Star Trek canon at will, and then ignore it at will as well. So the new Khan is different from the old Khan. He’s still a super soldier from three centuries in the past who was genetically engineered to be superior in every way, except in the new timeline apparently remedial Earth history is no longer taught at Starfleet Academy, because no one – no one – on the Enterprise has any idea who he is when he speaks his name. It’s like Adolph Hitler showed up and no one had ever heard of him.

Ricardo Montalban played Khan in The Wrath of Khan with a seething rage and obvious intelligence that made the character awesomely dangerous. In the Wrath of Khan the wrath is personal, and it feels personal, and the plot is small scale as a result – a battle of wits between a superior human and a very flawed human captain in the form of James T. Kirk.

The Khan in Into Darkness is supposed to be brilliant, but we’re told this and not shown it, really, as we’re told he designed a lot of weapons systems and ships, and we’re told he’s brilliant, but all we’re shown is that he can kick ass just like every other movie villain ever. To be fair, the Khan in Khan is never shown really kicking ass physically, so call it a wash on technical points, but the chess match between Kirk and Khan in Wrath is a lot more fun to watch. The Khan in Into Darkness could have been named Barry for all the continuity brought to the character. Literally nothing about the character is specific to the Khan we got to know in 1967 and 1982, respectively. Benedict Cumberbatch rocks it, sure enough. His line readings are chilling. But the character never amounts to more than a tough, ruthless guy who, after we’re told how dangerous he is, ends up running away from Mr. Spock.

And the movie ends with a fistfight. Brain the size of a planet, superior genetics, and it just comes down to Spock and Khan slugging it out like … every other goddamn action movie I’ve seen in the last 10 years. Booo.

What’s really fascinating is that Abrams seems to even be aware of this, because he actually goes through the trouble of bringing Leonard Nimoy in as Spock Prime solely to offer Khan’s bona fides. Literally, Spock Prime shows up to glower and tell everyone in ominous tones that Khan is the most dangerous man in the universe – because nothing in the hour and a half that’s come before has made that clear at all.

So, I’ll take Ricardo Montalban’s hammy performance and the wonky special effects any day. Still, Star Trek: Into Darkness is a good movie, don’t get me wrong, well worth your ticket price. And if you’re not as emotionally tied to The Wrath of Khan as I am you might bond with Cumberbatch and be happy in your work. But for me, Khan 1982 would kick Khan 2013′s ass.

Here, songs:

Song565
Song568
Song572
Song572b
Song576
Song579

If anyone wants to know how to play these amazing songs, too bad; I forget them almost as fast as I record them.

The usual disclaimer: 1. I admit these are not great music; 2. I claim copyright anyway, so there; 3. No, I cannot do anything about the general quality of the mix, as I am incompetent.

I Was a (M)Ad Man by Richard Gilbert: I’m a big fan of Mad Men, like everyone else in then universe. I also understand it’s fiction and doesn’t really depict the 1960s or even the Ad business accurately. This book by Richard Gilbert, who was actually working on Madison Avenue during that era, does:

Dominus by Christine Fonseca. This one was a lot of fun for different reasons. I like getting into the feel and spirit of a book and coming up with all the elements to give you a feel for it in one minute. It’s a wholly different challenge than actually writing the book. I think I nailed it on this one:

Go buy books.

Millions of years later, the city of Rome is founded. Thousands of years after that, the guitar is invented. Then  electricity. Then Rock n’ Roll. Then Eddie Money himself is born, joins the NYPD, quits to pursue a recording career. Somewhere in there my wife is born. Somewhere in there I am born. I am vaguely aware of Eddie Money and the five or six songs that always got played on the radio when I was a kid. I grow up. I meet my wife. We get married. And one day she emails me and says, BTW I just bought us two tickets to see Eddie Money in New York in May.

And I say, holy shit, you’re kidding.

And my wife is not amused.

So there I am on a Saturday night with a glass of whiskey seated uncomfortably at a table with The Duchess and three other people. It’s a packed house, which is amazing. Up until a few weeks before I had assumed Eddie Money was either dead or working at a Wal Mart somewhere. I mean seriously: Eddie Money.

The show is, however, kind of fun. Eddie is 64 and looks it, and he dances and moves on the stage in a way that frequently alarms. You sit and watch him and every now and again you wonder if he’s going to just fall to the floor and start twitching, because his stage moves are the kind you imagine older folks perform when stroking out. But god bless him, because he puts on a decent show and there are actually more hits than I remember.

I’m not a big Eddie Money fan. I don’t actually own any of his songs, despite hearing so many of them at least a thousand times each over the course of my lifetime.

But it’s kind of impressive in general that he’s still making a living from his songs. And from a really embarrassing commercial currently on TV, too. But still: If I’m able to make money from my art several decades from now, that would be amazing. So good for Eddie Money. Not so good for me. Because now when someone asks, with raised eyebrow, Who in the world goes to an Eddie Money show? You can point at me and say “He does.”

In 1997, I wrote a novel. After a lengthy period of writing in the SF/F genres exclusively (though I didn’t think of them as genres back then but just as Shit I Wanted to Read and Therefore Write About) I entered into a period I think of as my Faux Literary Period, where I thought I should be writing about Velly Important Stuff and eschewing things like robots and magic. So I started writing about a bunch of alcoholic losers who rob an office where one of them works, thinking it would change their lives. At first it was titled Lie Down in Our Graves after a Dave Mathews song I’ve never heard, because my titles always suck.

I renamed the novel Lifers and in 1999 started sending it out, and sold it, unagented, to a tiny publisher out in California. For money! A microscopic advance and a standard royalty rate. I figured I’d made it and began purchasing rare whiskies in bulk.

I wish I’d had an agent, however, as it was a terrible contract I was saved from only because the publisher went out of business in 2004. I will never know how many copies of Lifers sold back then since I never received any sort of statement from them. Lifers got reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and The Philadelphia Inquirer but that didn’t amount to much.

So I started working on new novels. I wrote a few that shared a universe with Lifers because I thought it would be cool to do that. In 2001 I wrote a novel titled In Sad Review which I thought was pretty good, and a few years later I started sending it around – this time to agents, because my experience with Lifers had taught me that I needed someone who knew what they were doing on my side. In 2004 I got a response from an agent. She was just getting started, but she loved the book, and she signed me up, although she required me to ditch the terrible title and re-christened it Chum. I figured I’d made it, and began purchasing furnishings for my future mansion.

A year or two later we hadn’t sold it, and I embarked on the first of several revisions, deleting material, adding material, sharpening it. Then we sort of accidentally sold a science fiction book called The Electric Church. I figured I’d made it, and began having all my underwear custom made in Italy.

Let’s fast-forward over the next nine years or so. Nine years. Occasionally we’d take Chum out of its jar and poke at it. I rewrote it a total of five times, I think. When we were bored or depressed we’d have a Chum party. My agent had smart people in her office read it and give me notes. Every now and then I’d ask her if Chum was a dead letter because it had been on submission for so long. She’d always assure me that Chum had a special place in her heart and would never be abandoned.

And this week, nine years later, I signed a contract to publish this book.

If nine years and five revisions isn’t inspiring, I don’t understand you. It underscores how much of the publishing business is about the right time, the right editor. All you need is someone who reads your work with the same level of enthusiasm that you have when you wrote it.

Chum isn’t exactly a sequel to Lifers. It shares a universe and some characters, but the story is wholly independent. In Chum you can also glimpse scenes from other novels I wrote around the same time, all unpublished. But after this, who knows? You may see them after all.

This essay originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 17, Issue 3/4.

Hoping the American Empire Lasts a Few More Decades: I Need the Book Sales

I’m just a regular Joe with a regular job
I’m your average white suburbanite slob
I like football and porno and books about war
I’ve got an average house with a nice hardwood floor

- Denis Leary, “Asshole”

[Begin transcript of unaired interview conducted in Manhattan]

SWAY CALLOWAY: So I’m sittin’ down with … wait, who the … Christie? Hey, Christie? Who is this guy? I thought we were doing the –

JEFF SOMERS: Take off your hat.

SC: What? Wait – thanks Christie, but – wait, what?

JS: I’ve never seen you without the little hat. Take it off. I want to see what you’re hiding under there.

SC: I never take off my hat, dude. Now hold tight while the PA gets the sheets for today. I have no idea who you are, or why I’m sitting here with you. I thought we were –

JS: Don’t worry, Jay-Z will be fine.

SC: Uh, what?

JS: He’ll be fine. He’s just unconscious and locked in the trunk of a car that’s probably in Bayonne by now. But we’ll release him as soon as I’m done here, no worries.

SC: No worries. You … you touched Hova?

JS: No worries. I just want you to interview me, and once that’s done, no one needs to get hurt. Would I hurt Shawn? No, I would not.

SC: Christie! How about calling the police, instead, babe, huh?

JS: That’s fine. Just get on with the interview.

SC: Interview? About what, man?

JS: I’m offering all my money to the Presidential Candidate who promises to increase the military budget the most and start the most new wars.

SC: Again: What?

JS: I’m going to sell off my entire zine-publishing empire and take all my book royalties and advances and such and offer the whole mess of cash to the candidate for President who promises to increase military spending and our involvement in foreign wars the most.

SC: Shit, do we not have any kind of security in this place? Is that liquor?

JS: Technically, it’s mouthwash. But it gets the job done.

SC: Holy shit.

JS: Look, we have at least five minutes before they wrestle me away. Why not ask me some questions? Like, why are you giving your fortune to promote military spending and war?

SC: Let’s start with: How much money are we talking about?

JS: Let’s see. Sell the house, the car … the Inner Swine office party fund … IRAs … royalties on six novels … random cash from TIS subscribers … About Five hundred and six dollars, Sway.

SC: That … that is not a lot of money, man.

JS: Maybe not to you, big-shot MTV VJ rapper guy. But to the poor, sincere farmers and carpenters who want to be President, I assure you it is. And all they have to do is rain hell down on the world around us.

SC: Uh … okay, fine. Why?

JS: I’m glad you asked, Sway. You see –

SC: Wait a second.

JS: – I’ve never been able to learn a foreign language.

SC: Wait. Wait … I have a headache. Christie? Do we have any –

JS: TAKE YOUR HAT OFF, MAN!

SC: Never!

####

SC: Very well. You were saying about languages?

JS: I have tried, often, to learn another language, but my brain, it is … not good … at such things. Bork! Bork!

SC:

JS: Excuse me.

SC: So, uh, what does your inability to learn a language have to do with military spending and war?

JS: Obviously, I can only write novels in English. So I need the United States to remain the dominant cultural force in the world, to make sure I have the largest market to sell books to. If we were to, say, become Belgium in terms of market share, I’d be screwed.

SC: Why’s that?

JS: What’s the last Belgian novelist you read?

SC: I can’t believe I’am about to … point taken. So, you want the United States to maintain your book market share through military adventures?

JS: Sure! We’re an empire. As an empire we’re doomed to a certain cycle: We spend too much money on our military to maintain our empire, and thus our infrastructure rots away and our population grows less educated and less capable. Eventually we collapse. Right now, English is still the dominant language around the world. People from all over email me about my books. What happens when we collapse into something resembling England, and China is exporting all the films and entertainments? That’s right: I’m back to dancing on street corners for pennies. I WILL NEVER GO BACK!

SC: Oh shit –

JS: AS GOD AS MY WITNESS I WILL GET YOU TO REMOVE YOUR HAT, SIR!

####

SC: Are we sure these belts are tight around his wrists and ankles? Hello? Christie? Are we sure?

JS: Since I’m tied to this chair now, you might as well finish the interview before the police come.

SC: Actually, there are plenty of better –

JS: Yes! See, the reason Shakespeare and Chaucer and Hemingway are the most famous writers in history is because we’ve had centuries of culture dominated by Western, English-speaking cultures. And thank god, because I can’t learn another language. I can barely muster the wit to memorize how to ask where is the toilet, I have consumed too much brandy in French, much less write a novel in Mandarin. If the whole cultural paradigm of the world shifts, I’m screwed.

SC: Well, you may be doing some prison time here, so you’re probably screwed anyway.

JS: Eh, prison doesn’t slow down writing careers. They’re pretty much at a full stop as it is. Am I right? High five!

SC:

JS: You, sir, are rude. Anyway, I figure if we continue to bomb the hell out of the world, they will continue to buy our books and movies and terrible Lady Ga Ga records. I don’t really understand why that is, but it appears to be so. The more we bomb the world, the more they want our Adam Sandler movies. And, I hope, Jeff Somers novels.

SC: I doubt it. Over here, officers!

JS: Rude.

[End transcript]

Sometimes, though, Google Alerts or something just brings a review to my door and it’s occasionally a happy moment. Recently, Sarah E. Bewley who runs a book review blog posted a review of Trickster that warmed my tiny black heart. It reads, in part:

“The book is powerful, terrifying, involving and makes you, as the reader, want to race to the end to see what happens. It is well worth every moment spent reading.

I look forward to more Lem and Mags. The world needs them.”

Huzzah for me, I say. Why not buy a copy? Papa needs liquor monies.

The Hollow Men

The Syndicate

Mind-eaters and soul-stealers, drug-dealers and drop-outs, minor miracles for small-time sinners, endless cycles and mean gray walls: It squatted gray and lifeless against the moon-lit horizon, behind a chain link fence designed to contain giants, to repel behemoths, soaring up beyond reason. It squatted three stories high, speckled in graffiti, grinning lopsidedly with teeth made up of windows which didn’t open. We stared at it long enough, surprised, I guess, by how strange it looked at night. I sucked on a cigarette, waiting for someone to move, feeling the wind stick its fingers into me, testing the surface tension.

The fence was easy. There had been talk, back when I’d been a freshman, of putting wire up on top of the fence. But it had never materialized, and the fence remained toothless. It was easy. Get a good running start, jump, grab hold, get set. pull up, hand over hand. Flip your legs over, brace yourself, and drop down. Less than a minute, and we stood panting in the courtyard.

There were four of us. Me. Gail, in black jeans, boots, and leather jacket. Henry, in front as always, blue eyes and little else. Kevin hulking in the rear. Our breath steamed in front of us nervously. We were surrounded by broken rules, swimming in the thick grease of guilt, and all we could do was smile at each other. It lay shattered at our feet and we grinned at our reflections in the shards and reveled that we had the power to cause it. Then Henry took off and we followed.

The side boiler-room door out back was still propped just so slightly open. Bill the mumbling old man who cleaned the place on good days hadn’t bothered to check it, as usual. Old bill could be counted on for two things: to be asleep by two every day, and to steal dirty magazines from our lockers. With that he was clockwork.

We slipped in and shut it behind us, making our way out of the works and into the lockers, dark and damp, foreign all of a sudden. We didn’t take our time. Working on fear and determination, we cut through the halls by memory and broke into the printing office with Henry’s screwdriver -push, pull, watch for falling wood chips.

I grabbed the paper, three packs of five hundred, from the side closet. Gail prepped the copier and set it up. The whine of its warm-up was ear-shattering. Kevin searched for the copy codes, popping open desk drawers with hard snaps of his own screwdriver, finally digging them up. Henry just watched, smoothing out the original.

Gail stepped back, Kev punched in the pass code, programmed fifteen hundred, and I loaded up the paper trays. We turned to Henry, and he was just grinning, watching us, looking crazy, his flashlight pointed up at his face and all the wrong shadows around his eyes. Then he slapped the page down and pressed start. The room filled with snapshot lightning, and we waited, getting nervous. nothing happened. Minor miracles for small-time sinners.

Done, we split up. We papered the place. We had to wade through papers to get out. Outside the gate, we checked time. Twenty minutes, exactly. henry joked that it took him longer to take a shit. It was his way of complimenting us. Then we each went home and forgot we’d seen each other.

Tuesday morning, before the bell, and already class had settled in for the day. The wake and bakers had left a cloud of sweet smoke behind them in the locker-room restrooms; taking a piss became a hallucinatory experience after seven-thirty. Fall-out for the cliques was lazy and all over the place, the calm before the storm that brewed up around lunch. They all glared at each other and pretended not to see, pretended they were the only people on the face of the earth.

I passed Gail on the way in but I didn’t say anything. She didn’t even glance at me. Her screwdriver was about to wiggle out of her back pocket, and I had to stop myself from pointing it out. I checked my own, instead.

The day had a soundtrack. Everyone mimed and moved silently beyond my headpones, the opening credits of some teen angst movie. There was no slow-motion, no special effects, no credits. But it seemed that way anyway. I stopped at my locker and leaned my board against it. it wasn’t the locker, or the combo lock, that they’d given me at the beginning of the year. I’d switched both off a couple of times, so if they tried to search the lockers, they’d have to figure out where I was and whose lock I had, first. I figured it might slow ‘em down a little. Make ‘em drown in their own paperwork.

I scanned the room, pulling off my phones, checking out my immediate neighbors, lost souls, minced minds, for all intents and purposes the enemy. On my right Chang the Politician blessed me with a good-morning sunshine smile, gladhanding even before first-light coffee. I eyed him cooly, which he accepted as a reply. To my left, the faceless freshman stuffed books into his full locker, sweating, pushing his glasses up every few seconds.

“Hey, punk, you feeling lucky today?” I said wearily, sticking a Lucky Strike between my lips.

The freshman, my pet freshman, my adopted freshman, looked up and smiled horribly, disfiguring himself. “Hey, Gavin.” he breathed.

I liked making the little fucker think, just for kicks. “If we’re so fucking free, asshole,” I began reasonably, “why do we have to keep all our stuff where they tell us to?”

Chang laughed his inoffensive, superior minded laugh. Chang had it coming.

“Uh,” the freshman grinned again, “to make it easier, I guess.”

I shook my head. “So they always know where to look, stupid. So we have no where to hide. So they can control us through fear, paranoia, and physical force. Didja know your locker is searched twice a year, random?”

He didn’t. He didn’t care. He wanted to get away.

Chang broke in. “You’re crazy, Stillman.”

I dumped my bag of tapes and shut my otherwise empty locker. “Chang, why can’t you suck my dick the way you suck everyone else’s?”

That made him blink. He’d been in his networking, polite argument, cocktail-conversation mode. The unprovoked attack made him jump, and I felt better. I struck a match. Chang stared, and I wanted to pop his eyes out.

“Shit, man, you can’t smoke in here.”

“What the fuck are they going to do? Put me in detention?” I asked, reasonably. “Ooh, big deal.” I stalked off, leaving blue smoke in my wake. I could feel their eyes on my back, heavy.

I didn’t belong anywhere. Not to the pretty-boy jocks done up on steroids and smutty-buddy male bonding. Not with the nerds or the flakes or the geeks or the dusters, burned-out druggies over the hill at fifteen. Not with the school spirit committee or even with the small-town least likely to succeed club. They’d all bought into the bullshit. The only place I belonged I couldn’t admit to. Not yet.

The halls were gray and relentless, prison halls. They taught us here, every day. They taught us not to fight. They taught us how to dress — I’d been in detention six times already for dress code violations. They taught us not to talk unless we raised our hands, not to take a piss or eat or sleep unless given permission. They taught us to do pointless, boring tasks over and over again without complaint. They taught us which words we were allowed to use, which opinions it was okay to have. They taught us to respond to bells, like animals in labs. They trained us.

Some of us were sick of it.

Walking up the stairs, I saw the flyers we’d hung up. People were already talking about them. Most of them were laughing at them, but that was okay. If just one person read it and knew what was going on, it was worth it. It was obvious we were going to get force-marched into an assembly about it. I blew smoke at people and paused at the foot of the next flight to unscrew the no-smoking sign from the wall.

####

Upstairs was a little brighter. The nerds for hire shuffled paper and copied homework for their pals-for-a-day jocks. The barbie-doll grads compared lipstick and blow-job technique, evaluating every cock walking by on a marriage-scale. The punks sat sullen and self-righteous, confusing laziness with revolution. I spat stares at them, but really had no dislike for them. They were good decoys.

Henry sat in the lobby amongst less gifted peers, his blue eyes locked on me. I sat down next to him and pretended not to know him, ashing on the floor. I could feel his tension. I wondered if we’d been nailed about the flyers.

After a moment he stood up and walked off; I knew better than to follow. A piece of folded loose-leaf sat expectantly on his chair, and I picked it up. Unfolded, it revealed a single line:

It’s on tonight.

I got up and found him in the bathroom. We propped the door shut with a trashcan, and I set fire to the note.

“Who?”

He grinned. Henry was crazy. Henry was nuts. He grinned and you heard marbles rolling loose in his head. He bummed a cigarette off me and slowly unscrewed the hinge on the first stall, for fun.

“The shithead’s name is Thompson.” He said, his voice the usual off-center drawl. His eyes were blood-shot and his nose was thin and sharp, a rat’s face. “I don’t know him too well.”

“Why him?”

The stall door fell off with an echoed crash, and Henry shrugged. “Someone, right?”

I nodded and swallowed, suddenly nervous. We had never done something like this before, but as we got older and bolder the stakes became higher. The air shimmered and the pact was made. I unpropped the door, and homeroom bell rang.

####

Principal Davids was a middle-aged woman in high heels who’d once been a pretty girl in tight skin. She had an adult sneer on her face, fear and awe of the kids given way to bland, useless rage. Half of us wanted to fuck her, tie her down and make her bleed. The other half wanted to stuff a rolled up newspaper down her gas tank and light a match. I usually combined the two into one luscious daydream.

She took the steps leading up to the stage almost daintily, stood before the microphone, and took a moment to scowl at us all. I smiled, hoping she could see me. I doubted it. Her hair was pulled back, leaving her face exposed and made up, pale and loose. She was old.

She unfolded a piece of paper and held it aloft. My grin grew triumphant. She stood alone on the stage facing a huge crowd of us, condemning our flyer.

“This is a disgrace — ” she began.

I started applauding, on cue with my fellows. There were only a few of us, but the mince-minds thought it would be fun and joined in. We drowned her out and she waited for us to stop, jaw-clenched. Gleefully, I saw an unhealthy purple cast creep into her face.

I looked down at my black Chucks and waited for her to resume.

“This sort of filth will not — ”

I had barely begun to clap when the whole auditorium kicked in. Davids stepped back and studied us coldly, her eyebrow arcticly cocked, icy and disgusted. But there was nothing she could do. Just as we were dying down again, someone let loose the loudest wolf whistle I’d ever heard and everyone clapped harder, letting out cheers.

We kept it up for a while, making Davids red and three shades of purple in the face. Finally, though, the kids grew bored and started to figure that the fastest way out of the auditorium was to let her have her say. Smart, those kids.

She condemned our flyer. Anything calling for physical harm to teachers and damage to the school was reprehensible, according to her. I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms, looking at her over the rims of my sunglasses. She wrapped it up by saying that an investigation into the identities of the involved parties was going to be launched, and that criminal charges would be brought. I gave her the finger and slouched out of the auditorium with the rest of the cows. Instead of class, though, I went to the library and read a few pages here and there. Eventually, they found me, and yelled, gave me detention, and sent me on my way. I sulked out grinning, the endless cycle complete again.

####

Lunch was everyday bedlam. The little truces that kept life peaceful were thin-skinned, at lunch. I sat with Henry in the back, eating Jello and smoking. Nobody liked us. No one sat with us. It was our cheerful attitudes, I think.

Some chick was walking around getting people to sign up for a blood drive. She sat down next to Henry and flashed us her flossed, blinding smile. We both smiled back, reptilian, lips and teeth.

“Hi, guys.” she chirped.

“Hi.” Henry said. I grinned a high-volume smile at her. She seemed to think we liked her. I supposed she didn’t meet many who didn’t.

“You guys want to give blood?”

“I got a few pints back home I could give you.” Henry said with a thoughtful look.

“I’d rather give semen.” I leered.

She wrinkled her nose and beat a hasty retreat. We laughed, and returned our attention to the nothing we’d been thinking of.

“There he is.”

I glanced up at Henry, and then followed his gaze to Thompson. I nodded. “Gotcha.”

“I wonder if we’ll have an assembly about this?”

I smiled. I looked at him. “Let’s go get some Ho-Hos.”

For kicks, I followed the blood girl for the afternoon. She had Morrow for algebra and I could smell brain death in the air. She’d spotted me in the halls as I sucked down Ho-Hos and tailed her (pretty obviously, I think) and kept staring at me. Finally, while Morrow was scratching something on the board, I got up and took the empty seat next to her. She looked ready to boil away.

I leaned on one arm and stared at her. My hairspray was getting gummy; I guessed I looked horrendous. I grinned. “Hi.”

She kept her eyes on Morrow. Everybody else pretended I was a desk.

I sighed like Jack Nicholson; aping Nicholson is a bad habit of mine. “I sometimes see the darkened moon, shining in your eyes.” I said, off the top of my head, a little too loud. She turned to me, eyes wide with that oh-my-god-people-are-looking-at-me stare.

“What?” she gasped.

“I sometimes see the darkened moon, shining in your eyes, I’d like to taste the sweet caress hidden between your thighs.” I sighed again. Everyone was looking. “Your sweaty thoughts around me like a pair of silken gloves, thrust and break ignore the pain kneel and taste the blood.”

Mr. Morrow was ordering me from his class. I still had a stanza to go.

“The nights torment me, useless past of mine, our one night together, burned into my mind.”

Morrow pulled me up by the arm and started pushing. I let him. The look of horror on her face was worth it, and I was in a great mood. On the way out, I even smiled.

####

Davids’ office had my initials carved around its perimeter a hundred times. There was a waiting area outside her door, where her secretary sat at her desk and delinquents sat awaiting judgment. All the chairs bore my mark, as did most of the wall and some of the desk. Sometimes carved other people’s initials, too.

The secretary was gone, so I spent a few minutes removing something which looked vital from her typewriter with my trusty Phillips. There was a big stack of confiscated flyers on her desk. I smiled. It didn’t matter if anyone read them -we didn’t expect much from the rest of the mince-minds. We did it just to do it, just to get under Davids’ skin. And if someone got to thinking because of it, and maybe saw the reason behind it, even better. We did it because we weren’t supposed to.

I lit a Lucky, rummaged through the desk and found a pad and pen. I started writing down my new poem. I kind of liked it.

The door opened, and Davids glared at me as if she expected me to get scared. “Who are you?” she snapped.

“I thought you’d know me by now.” I offered, reasonably enough, I think.

She ripped open a file and tore through it. The thing is, I didn’t hate Davids. I disliked her, sure, but I disliked a lot of people. She truly believed she was doing right, so I couldn’t hate her. But I didn’t spare her. Stupidity was no excuse.

“Stillman.” Her eyes flashed up at me. “You’re in quite a lot of trouble, young man.”

“Don’t I know it, old lady.” I replied. “And it’s getting worse every day.”

She smiled, which surprised me. “No,” she said, “every minute.”

The babe had spirit.

####

After a blistering interrogation squeezed into five minutes, I was ushered into my final class with a screretarial escort. My cigarettes had been confiscated, so I just sat in the back and listened to Miss Crowers lecture me about Hamlet. I asked her a few questions, but she refused to answer me unless I raised my hand, so we stalemated. Eventually, I dozed off.

####

I’d missed a lifetime of gossip. Henry had told some milk-white handjob queen to fuck off, and her boyfriend had vowed to make Henry an unpleasant statistic. I slouched down the corner on my board and watched the proceedings. I saw Gail and Kev in the crowd, as well as Geezer and Norm, and caught eyes one at a time. We all smiled at each other.

The guy was big. He wore his JV jacket like it meant something -wrestling, which meant he thought he was tough. We’d prove him wrong. Right after the verbal assaults, while the jerk was pulling off his jacket, we stepped in. I socked him in the face with my board, Gail went for the balls, and while he lay on the ground bleeding and moaning, we quite literally kicked the shit out of him. And none of the sheep said or did anything. Afterwards, we walked off in our own directions, sweaty. I think Mr. JV had been expecting a fair fight, and if so then we had taught him a valuable lesson.

Someone

I escaped the homestead that night by the skin of my teeth, boarding around the dark, listening to the Ramones. The night made it all gray and pale and lifeless. Pointless. I rolled past the stoners in the park, wasting another night, and the kids on dates strolling along the sidewalks, careful, polite lust looking for a quiet place to drool. I breezed past them all, dressed in black, a phantom bent on murder. They didn’t know that, though. I made a few trolling cars hit their brakes hard and burn rubber; I suppose I’ll get hit, eventually.

I was aimless for a while, but when it started to feel like midnight, I made for school, soundtrack off and eyes open.

We met outside the gym, hidden by a clump of trees. Gail wasn’t there. No one mentioned it. Henry smiled at us all, beaming, and then his eyes flicked behind us.

“Hey.”

We all turned. Thompson stood with his hands in his pockets, looking chilly. Henry had invited him out with the friendly way Henry could have, if he wanted it.

“Hey.” Thompson replied, nodding. “What’s up?”

He had a disarming, lop-sided smile.

Henry nodded, and we moved in. Kevin grabbed him and wrapped a meaty hand around his mouth and an entire arm around his neck, squeezing just enough. The rest of us grabbed the rest of him, and we dragged him, kicking and puffing, into the gym. I dragged my switchblade across his neck, Henry pulled a red permanent marker from his hip pocket and wrote on his chest in quick, decisive letters. Then we left him there, went out the front door and ran, splitting up. I had blood on my hands. I think if we’d stayed together, Henry would have said something like it would have taken him longer to shit.

####

By the time the next day rolled around, he’d been found and the cops were looking for a brutal murderer, a phantom with no face or name. The gym was roped off, and seven hundred mince-minds and their shepherds stood outside gawking.

I was sipping coffee in a careful mimic of the plan-clothes cops skulking around. I fell in behind Chang and his girlfriend, the Ice Queen Diane herself.

“Hey, Chang. Gettin’ any?”

She hated me. I wondered why.

He glanced at me. “Stillman.” he said carefully.

“What’s going on?”

“Kid named Thompson’s dead.” he said with a glint in his usually laconic eyes.

“No shit, huh?” I sipped coffee. There was blood under my fingernails. I looked at Chang. “It doesn’t bother you that we’re all here just waiting to see the corpse?”

He glanced nervously at Diane. It was starting to look like we knew each other, for god’s sake. “Christ,” he chuckled, “you’ve got to relax a little. Stillman.”

I nodded. “You’d like that, huh.”

I moved away and stood behind a gaggle of girls. “I hear the word NARC is written on his chest in blood.” I said.

One turned to me. “Yeah, except I heard it was written in shit.”

I raised both eyebrows. “Wow.” I said, thinking that that would have been the perfect touch. I filed it away for future reference. “No shit, huh?”

She nodded heavily.

I walked away grinning secretly, hiding it by drinking coffee and lighting a cigarette. I made my way politely to the front and leaned on one of the police barricades.

Davids stood talking with a suit and tie dick, a tall one who slouched next to her with a pissed off smirk and unshaven face. He didn’t seem to like her, and kept running a hand through his dark hair and accidentally blowing smoke in her face. I tried to hear what they were saying. Instead, I heard the guy next to me.

“I heard they carved the word PIG on his chest.”

I smiled, studying the smoke from my cigarette dreamily. “I heard they shoved a red hot poker up his ass and it’s still glowing.”

I felt stares.

“No shit?”

I tried to look solemn. “No shit.”

Davids had one of our flyers, and handed it to the smirking cop. I grinned. This was victory, as nervous as it made, as much as it made me want to throw up, this was it. The only way to be vindicated by the world was to be on its shit list.

I turned and dived back into the crowd to find Henry, to tell him. he’d love it. It would make his day.

The sheep were mooning about, losing interest. The nature of death prevents any true relationships, and it’s hard to care about a body under a sheet. I couldn’t blame them.

####

We didn’t get a day off, and on line in the lunch-room that was all they cared about. The crappy day off.

I sat in the usual place with Henry and Tara, who he fucked around with but didn’t trust. Over cheese fries and cokes we talked about it all as if we weren’t murderers.

The expanse of power as we sat and acted and kept secrets was great. It was intoxicating, and I started to glance around with the canny look of a spy. Tara said I looked sick.

She was tall and dark-haired, dim-eyed and sour. She had a nice enough body, smooth and taut. She wasn’t too bright, but she was into cool bands and put out, so Henry was as close to in love as he got.

“Hello there, guys.”

We looked up and watched our rat-faced detective as he sat down next to me. He smelled like nicotine and after-shave. He smiled as if he didn’t care that we didn’t like him. We stared back.

“We used to just have pep rallies in the gym, when I was your age.”

I nodded wisely. Henry smiled. “Is that the theory -ritual sacrifice in the name of school spirit?”

Dick seemed taken aback. We’d caught him off guard. “Er, no.” he admitted lamely. Then he smiled and looked up. “But it’s not a bad idea. I’ll look into it. You kids know him?”

“A little.” Tara said, gloomily.

“Hmmn.” Dick breathed. “I hear he went to meet some kids last night.”

“Christ,” I muttered, “you can’t even trust your friends anymore.”

“That’s right!” Henry said brightly.

“You wouldn’t kill me, would you?” I whined.

Dick got the joke and stood up, dropping a card onto the table. “That’s my number, kids. You’re on Ms. Davids’ shit list, so I’ll be poking around you a lot. Keep your noses clean, okay? And if you think of anything, give me a call.”

“Ten-four.” Henry said with a wave.

Dick looked at us with a weird sort of cock to his eyebrow. “In my day, kids joined the boy scouts, not the Hitler Youth.”

I shrugged. “Bullshit.”

He seemed to accept that, and moved on.

“Seig Heil.” Henry said, with quite a professional salute.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “We would’ve been in the French Resistance.”

“The what?” Tara asked. I just shook my head.

####

In gym class, Rat Willer lined us up in our uniforms and gave us a speech. Half the gym was roped off, and the divider was closed. Nothing interfered with gym class, not even death.

We called Mr. Willer “Rat” because he twitched his nose. It wasn’t a personal thing. He was an asshole, but we didn’t call him “Rat” for that. That’s what the word “asshole” had been invented for. We called him Rat because he looked like one.
He was otherwise a stout, thick-chested bitter man of middle age, with a military buzz and a sadistic approach to physical education. He usually wore a bright white T-shirt tucked into stained gray shorts, and I think that even if he hadn’t been our gym teacher, we would’ve hated him.

The speech was about death. He seemed to think we were all traumatized, and his talk of carrying on and bucking up gave Henry ideas. He winked at me and started to back away, an odd light in his eyes. I started to laugh right away, and did my best to hide it.

He waited until he had people’s attention, and put his arms out all crazy. “He’s not dead!” he shouted. “He’s not dead! He can’t be dead! He’s alive! Alive!”

And he turned and ran.

Because I couldn’t keep from laughing for much longer, I ran after him. We left a stunned silence behind, and ran all the way to Tony’s Pizza Haven two blocks away, pulling the fire alarm as we did. An hour later, they were still doing head counts to see how many had escaped. Davids grabbed us right away and gave us each a lifetime of detention, for suspicion of who knew what. We just grinned.

####

In detention, we busied ourselves unscrewing our desks while Mrs. Billings dozed. She was the old lady of the school, blue-haired and matronly, constantly cat-napping and occasionally dotty. Henry and I liked her, more or less, and usually left her alone. When my desk collapsed half way through and startled her awake, I was almost apologetic.

Outside, we walked together and discussed strategy, losing interest again a few minutes later and talking about bullshit to pass the time. An idea came to us. A grand idea. A pristine, perverse stroke of genius. Neither of us could recall who had it. That’s the way it goes sometimes, like an epiphany. Minor miracles for small time sinners.

####

It took a few days to get it going. In the mean time we stayed out of the usual trouble and answered questions; Dick the friendly plain clothes man led his charming gestapo through the school, questioning us all cheerily on the subject of our dead classmate, collecting statements from anyone who knew the late, great Thompson or looked like they might. We smiled at our personal cop and lied a lot, and I think by the end of it he liked us a great deal.

Surreptitiously, Henry and I cornered the rest of us and held meetings, enlisting their support. After that, it was almost standard operating procedure, although Gail wasn’t with us. Gail wasn’t around much at all. We propped open the boiler room door again and hit the copy room again and no one was waiting for us, no one expected us, no one was there to stop us.

The next day the school was wallpapered with eight by eleven warnings: ONE DOWN, THE WHOLE SCHOOL TO GO.
It caused quite a stir. Davids and her fellow teachers scampered around swishing their tails in alarm, ripping down the signs and sometimes losing their cool. henry and I avoided each other, but caught stares, gleeful stares, and knew how we felt.

####

We swam through the next few weeks noiselessly. We started getting into the same old trouble again, but nothing serious, nothing conspired. The teachers were skittish, and we loved it. Several refused to come to work without police protection -so we never quite got rid of the pigs- but it was worth it. Chaos loomed everywhere and we stood ready and willing to fall through the cracks.

Dick came back not too many weeks later, dressed in a better suit and a tan trench coat, with a bunch of faceless grunt cops in tow. Davids met them, they disappeared into a classroom, and in homeroom I got a summons to room 113. I met Henry and Gail in the hall, but we didn’t say anything to each other. Gail wouldn’t even look at us.

Room 113

Dick looked me over. there were three other men in the room, standing facelessly in the back, drinking coffee. In the center of the room was a single plastic chair, bright yellow. He gestured at it.

“Sit.”

I slouched over and sat, smiling.

“Name?”

“Davids files that incomplete?”

Silence.

“Stillman, Gavin B.”

“B for what?”

“B for Betty.”

“Middle name Betty?”

“Middle name B.”

“B?”

“B.”

He glowered at me.

“Have a sensa humor, old man.” I said.

“Did you kill Ken Thompson?”

It made me pause. I shrugged, feeling my heart shudder and stumble. “It was a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t think I can remember a murder.” I managed.

He grunted. Something had changed in him — and I realized an act had been dropped. It made me momentarily nervous.

“Don’t like school?”

“Hate school.”

“Why?”

“It’s a training ground for the next herd.”

He laughed. I smiled, all-vicious.

“Hate teachers?”

“Part of the problem. Don’t hate them, can’t excuse them.”

“Huh. And cops?”

“Oh, I love cops. My Dad owns stock in Donuts.”

“Funny.” He returned my vicious smile. “You killed Ken Thompson.”

I shrugged. “No.”

“Henry Piller just signed a statement claiming you did.” he sighed. “I guess it’s true. I was hoping it wasn’t, but…”

I snorted. “Sure.” I felt sweat on my brow now, and hated myself for it. I wasn’t going to give in to their mind games.

He started to chuckle. “You know,” he gasped, “we’re the same, you and me.” To illustrate, he pointed at me, and then at himself.

“Bullshit.” I snapped.

“The same. This is classic.”

We stared at each other. His face had become shadowed, indistinct, his sick little grin the only thing I could see. He stood before me, hands on hips, his clothes baggy and about to explode. It occurred to me that I was about to be arrested, or at least officially accused. I was tight and I wanted to shout — but I couldn’t, my head was empty. I just licked my lips and he just smiled at me, with gibbering eyes. I had to shut him up, rip his teeth out and make him choke on his own blood.

He opened his mouth, and I shouted.

“Fuck you!”

He slowly closed his mouth, and smiled all through it.

“Fuck you! Okay?”

“You’re a rebel.”

I just sweated. I’d been caught. I was fucked. life suddenly seemed short and tight. He leaned down so his smile filled up the space before me.

“You got a cause, kid?”

I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. An eyebrow went up and he was suddenly leering at me.

“You ready to die for it?”

The fire alarm went off. For a moment, we stared at each other, and then I dived out the door.

####

Into a sea of kids I ran, melting into chattering hostility with the ease of the professional, dodging and ducking for the secret, faster ways out we’d researched. I could only hope the rest of us were doing the same, but we’d all understood that it was every man for themselves, in the end.

The pigs swam upstream, too big, too slow, too used to being in charge. Before they’d even picked me out of the crowd, I was gone. Down the stairs, through the boiler room, out the door, pounding the pavement in a dry sort of panic. I didn’t want to get caught. They could break you, if they wanted to. I’d seen it happen. They could mince your mind and make you sign confession, they could teach you guilt.

Coda

Henry picked me up on the Highway. We both wore sunglasses. He was playing Bad Brains on the deck.

I leaned back and lit a cigarette, put my feet up on the dash and watched the strip malls flash by, the thin-walled houses, the gas stations. Kids. They swarmed at the arcades and the schoolyards we passed, pissing out territories and working part time to pay for shit, flies stuck on paper so soon, so young.

Silently, we drove. The free don’t need to talk. The free just have to keep moving, and in motion the words get lost in the breeze, anyway.

I think I captured the urgency of the book pretty well. It’s a great read – check it out!

The Brain Cloud Cometh

I’m at “That Age”

by Jeff Somers

“That” Age

PIGS, I don’t go to doctors much. Part of this is my Viking heritage (buried deeply in my genetic code, yes, but I am convinced it’s there), which makes me naturally hardy. Part of this is the usual charming male hubris that informs me that I can walk anything off. Lose a limb? Walk it off, hands on your hips, taking deep breaths. Coughed up a lung? Take the bench for an inning, you’ll be fine. Part of it, of course, is my general incompetence and bad memory: I am usually shocked to discover when my last doctor’s appointment was.

Also: How awkward. I mean, I’m terrible at social interaction as it is. Make me naked under a thin hospital gown while another man cops a feel, and my small talk just dries the hell up, trust me.

My infrequent visits to the various doctors we need to stay alive from year to year used to be more or less perfunctory: My old General Practitioner, whom I’d gone to from the age of five until I was about 25, used to tell me to keep the weight off and to never smoke cigarettes, and that was usually the entire content of our conferences. Even past that I usually coasted through examinations: I was either there for a specific reason, burrowing towards a prescription and getting on with my life, or I was there for some sort of routine physical, generally passing with flying colors. Recently, though, while my visits are still not exactly complex or problematic, there’s a new wrinkle cropping up: My advancing age.

####

I’m not old. I mean, I don’t think so; age is relative and if I’m going to get hit by the #89 bus in Jersey City next week (or smashed up in my Own Personal Intersection of Death in Highland Park, new Jersey) then, in a sense, I am old, relatively. But I’m still young and hip, I think. But I’m edging up to that magical age when doctors apparently change their entire approach, because more and more when I go to the doctor I’m being told that in a “couple of years” the tests I’m given will all change. Overnight, apparently, I will be old, and the focus will cease to be keeping me healthy and simply be keeping me comfortable. Or something like that.

For example, I recently realized it’s been 5 years since I had my eyes examined, and I was squinting my way through life like Mr. Magoo (you youngin’s can Google him). The examination went more or less as expected, until one point where the doctor suddenly looked off into the distance and began discussing me as if I wasn’t in the room.

DOC: Of course, in a couple of years we’ll have to start testing to see if you need bifocals.
ME: What?
DOC: Assuming you don’t die before then, of course. Odds are, after all, that you will.
ME: What?
DOC: DO YOU NEED ME TO SPEAK MORE LOUDLY, SIR?

This is disturbing. I look in the mirror and I think I look pretty much exactly like I did when I was eighteen. Maybe a bit of gray hair, a little careworn, and the way my liver bulges out of my side like a football is, perhaps, not ideal. But still, I think I could time travel back to my college days and kill myself and take his place pretty easily, and paradox be damned.

The worst example of this was when my current GP told me, very matter-of-factly, that in a “couple of years” we’d stop groping my testicles to test for testicular cancer and start testing for prostate problems. The implications of this were allowed to hang in the air like a thick mist of shame, and naturally I wanted to protest in the boldest possible terms that I was not that age yet. Who am, I Rudy Guiliani? Joe Torre?

####

It’s natural, of course; As you get older your physical state declines and your chances of coming down with horrible defects increases, but at the same time if you make it a certain length of existence without coming down with certain things, chances are you won’t, so the tests have to change. It’s just the transition from Check-for-Young-Man’s-Afflictions to Check-If-he’s-Still-Breathing is kind of horrifying. It makes you want to follow doctors around, begging them to palpate your testicles to check for testicular cancer.

Another aspect of this are the new and absolutely terrifying tests you start to grow into. Suspect number one in this grimy list is the Colonoscopy: You hit a certain age, you’re supposed to let someone shove a camera up your ass every few years to check for polyps or tumors or elves living secretly inside you or something. Not only does this sound horrible, eye-witness (ass-witness?) accounts confirm it: It’s uncomfortable, humiliating, and the side effects last for days. Side-effects here being a polite euphemism for uncontrollable bowel-movements.

My own personal nightmare, however, centers on that inevitable day when a doctor gives me a choice between living and drinking—you know, that moment when he’s holding up an X-Ray or something of my liver and I initially mistake it for a basketball in a bowl of Jello and we laugh and laugh and then he tells me to quit drinking or I’ll be dead in a month and we cry and cry.

He spent fifteen years getting loaded
Fifteen years ’till his liver exploded
Now what’s Bob gonna do now that he can’t drink?
The doctor said, “What you been thinkin’ ’bout?”
Bob said, “That’s the point,
I won’t think about nothing
Now I gotta do something else,”
–NOFX, “Bob”

Getting old is a bitch, chums.