The Convulsion Factory (30 page)

In A Roadhouse Far, Past The Edge Of Town.
More vignette than story, this; a chance to indulge in a sick joke or two. Good friend Sean Doolittle called this my “Mickey and Mallory story,” and I admit to enthusiastically digging that spate of mid-nineties outlaw road movies like
Natural Born Killers
and
Love And A .45
and in particular the director’s cut of
True Romance,
even if Christian Slater does get seven shots out of his revolver when he blows away Gary Oldman. That urge to rampage arises occasionally. Especially when publishers don’t pay on time. I maintain that it’s an entirely healthy attitude.

Naked Lunchmeat.
2011 update:
The original entry for this story was a snarky rant limning an unfortunate situation surrounding the book it was initially written for, and could’ve been subtitled “How To Totally Mishandle A Sure Winner Of An Anthology And Make Sure It Never Gets Published Because The Publisher Had To Shoot It Through The Head Like One Of The Zombies It’s About.” If you really want to read it, track down a copy of the original hardcover edition, because I’m not reprinting it here. Sorry. Really. But no. Old, expired rancor is nothing I want to resuscitate. I try not to do grudges anymore. I try not to even give the appearance of doing grudges.

Here’s what counts. My first anthology sale was to John Skipp and Craig Spector, for their landmark
Book of the Dead
. Sharing my first table of contents with a bunch of people I idolized? Cartwheels for miles. John and Craig co-edited a second volume, then went their separate ways. Then things got … messy.

“Naked Lunchmeat” eventually made it into John’s
Mondo Zombie
, effectively the third and final installment in the series. It’s an affectionate and highly compressed pastiche of William Burroughs’ most infamous work. The idea came about by my wondering why, after the first two volumes, Doug Winter should have all the fun of writing parodies. Over the years it’s given copyeditors fits because they apparently weren’t familiar with Burroughs’ original, and the splintery, fractured permutations of its prose, which I’ve even toned down a lot. But was that ever good enough for them? Did that spare me the need of undoing their alleged corrections? Do I get that time back? Nooooooooooo!

And is this another rant starting? (Deep breath.) No grudges, no grudges…

Cancer Causes Rats.
This comes from an anthology called
Cold Blood,
conceived and very well-executed as a cross-genre affair, blending mystery, horror, suspense, and generally concerned with murder, my contribution being a chicken-and-egg look at the media and serial killers. I don’t believe that the media creates them, but wouldn’t say it discourages them, either. The main thing I’m proud of is that this story predates by years both
Natural Born Killers
and morphing as Hollywood’s most overused special effect. In an odd bit of genuine synchronicity, a couple of weeks ago, as I write this, I was phoned by a guy in Madison, Wisconsin, who owns/runs an indie label called Bovine Records, and fronts a band called Thug. Thug, a heavy, sludge-core type band, recorded a song based on and titled after the story, and last week I got a copy in the mail and found it to be a grinding, pummeling piece of work that ends in a noise loop featuring the word “mutate.” I love the whole idea, since the basis of the story was something being triggered to metamorphose into a new form.

Mostly Cloudy, Chance Of Kurt.
A few weeks after Kurt Cobain shot himself, I woke up one morning and this story was just
there.
I went straight to the Macintosh and started writing, and finished it over the subsequent three mornings, almost the way some people begin their day with a head-clearing cup of coffee. And when it was finished, it felt as if something had been put to rest. The suicide of the weatherman is also true, happening around the same time, but in St. Louis rather than Chicago. And in gradeschool gym class, I really did catch a softball between my knees. Briefly.

Heartsick.
Clark Perry, my close friend and Siamese twin joined at the id, also has a passion for those ineffable Re/Search books. I was visiting him in Tampa when he showed me a bit he’d recently encountered in
Those Who Are Not Like Us,
a volume devoted to old-time circus freaks and other human oddities. It concerned a fellow whose body had ossified, and thus he couldn’t move, and had to be toted around wherever he went. Came the fateful day, then, during the inevitable circus tent fire, that in their haste to hurry him to safety, his bearers dropped him …
and he shattered.
When later I felt like doing a story about what seems to be a deepening of people’s fear of/inability to connect emotionally, I could think of no better metaphor than this.

Extinctions In Paradise.
I suspect it’s true for most writers: that the way something turns out is the wholly random synergy of any number of diverse elements that happen to collide at the same time: aesthetic influences, news clippings, chance observations, personal issues going on in the writer’s life, whatever. As with any good pot of jambalaya, you make the volatile best of whatever happens to be on hand. When Ed Gorman invited me to do a story for the
Werewolves
anthology, I had no interest in approaching it from the standard Larry Talbot scenario. But I’d recently read a sad and wonderful novel called
Imagining Argentina,
and had been left with an itch to try something more within the magical-realism vein that’s pulsed through much South American literature. Maybe a year prior I’d been touched by an article about an elderly photographer who daily set up his antiquated gear near a fountain; in which South American city, I no longer remember. I’d long felt impotent and sick whenever I would read of death squads in Rio de Janeiro killing street kids. I was also in the midst of an ongoing editorial page debate with some Christian fundamentalists, seeing firsthand their mania for distortion of facts in service of their vision of the First Amendment. Then, too, I’d recently gotten Concrete Blonde’s
Mexican Moon
CD, and kept picturing Johnette Napolitano as Doña Mariana, with that earthy sensuality of hers. I wrote the last few pages listening to “Heal It Up” on infinite repeat — it just seemed to help. Six months in either direction and a very different story may have been written. But I’m very glad that Ed called when he did.

The Meat In The Machine.
I like industrial music, and felt like doing a story about obsession and transformation amongst a few of the artists recording the soundtrack to our
fin de siecle.
Fellow enthusiasts will no doubt recognize in the Giger Sanction’s stage show the inspiration of Skinny Puppy, who have the distinction of playing the most harrowing concert I’ve ever been to. After this club show — on what has since turned out to be their final tour* — I met instrumentalist Dwayne Goettel, who died of a heroin overdose in August of 1995. Brap on.

*
2011 update:
True for several years, but surviving members Ogre and cEvin Key reunited for a one-off show in 2000, and the band has been active again since 2003. And there was much rejoicing.

Extract.
I suspect we all share a dread concerning our teeth that goes beyond the subjective to the most primal layers of our limbic brains. In the wild, a toothless animal will be nearly defenseless and probably starve. A literally toothless person needs proxies, or a reliable blender; the metaphorically toothless inspire only mirth in their enemies. For as long as I can remember I’ve had a recurring nightmare in which my teeth grow huge, then wobbly, then start to crumble … yet I’ve never had a single cavity. My theory is, since as children we’ve all experienced a complete set of teeth falling out, this is all the foretaste of decrepitude and decay we need to scar us forever.

Liturgical Music For Nihilists.
This is still too fresh and ugly in mind for me to say much, other than I wanted to conclude the volume with something that would entwine all the main themes running through the stories that preceded it. It took longer to write than I thought, and I can’t say that it was ever much fun.

2011 update:
Okay. I suppose time enough has gone by.

The original seed: driving through those Chicago hinterlands time after time, fascinated by those desolate-looking parcels of field and woodland. They seemed very eerie to me … the possibility of some terrible, awe-inspiring thing going on inside one, hidden in plain sight, but that no one ever noticed, even as thousands, tens of thousands, drove past it every day.

There really was a slaughterhouse within walking distance of my childhood home, and I can just barely remember an adventurous winter trip there. It was abandoned by the time I was in high school, and gone a few years later as the surrounding neighborhoods expanded and digested the trees and land. The same fate erased just about every place I used to play and go wilding. It got leveled, mowed, civilized, buried under foundations and vinyl siding.

The “Khashab” brothers were real, and the younger one did backtrack fifteen or twenty steps one afternoon to help me pick up an armload of books, but that was the sum total of our lives’ interaction. A few years later, after his father burned his sister, I thought of how kind and gentle he seemed, even to a stranger, and wondered what kind of scars a thing like that was going to leave on him, too. The question has never left.

But looking back, what strikes me most is the amount of then-unknown truth and prophecy in this piece. To flip Kierkegaard around and put the punchline at the end, “Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.”

*

Heartfelt thanks go to all the editors/publishers who either commissioned these stories, or otherwise liked them enough to run them when they came in cold and unexpected: Michael Garrett & Jeff Gelb, David B. Silva, Tom Monteleone, Richard Chizmar, Richard Gilliam, Ed Gorman & Marty Greenberg (more than once), Jasmine Sailing, and Stefan Dziemianowicz, who bears no resemblance to the Stefan of “Heartsick,” insofar as I know.

Sincere gratitude to John Pelan for liking the extant pieces enough to want to group them together with a few new ones; and to Phil Nutman, Doli Nickel, and James Powell, for contributing in ways that I could not; and to Wildy Petoud and the Bluesman for … well, they know.

Appreciation is also extended to Sam Adams, Wicked Pete, Juan Valdez, and Creamy Saint Brendan, for always being there when I need them.

Brian Hodge

Vernal equinox, March 1996

About The Author

Called “a spectacularly unflinching writer” by Peter Straub, Brian Hodge is the author of ten novels, close to 100 short stories, and four collections of short fiction. Recent books include his second crime novel,
Mad Dogs
, and his latest collection,
Picking The Bones
.

He lives in Colorado, where he’s at work on a gigantic new novel that doesn’t seem to want to end, and distracts himself with music and sound design, photography, Krav Maga, and organic gardening.

Connect with him online through his web site (
www.brianhodge.net
), his blog (
www.warriorpoetblog.com
), or on Facebook (
www.facebook.com/brianhodgewriter
).