Blase Eight by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
Download the book in PDF, ePub, Kindle for a complete version.
Chapter 7- Content
Unwanted tears flow uncontrollably. You can’t define why.
It’s kind of everything. You’ve written a book in hope of communicating with the one you are no longer allowed to touch and love. Your Pollyanna-ish hopes would be crushed if you discovered that she doesn’t care in the least. The most hopeful dream you can conjure is that she once truly did. What happened?
You desperately need to believe that it was real. You reach deep.
The depth is found to be quite fine. No matter her flip-flopping intent, you have seen that to think of her as a muse, even one “oh so meta,” has “inspired” you to write books, and maybe get a lot of money for it.
The continual dead time is filled by the ancestral websites, which are avariciously and competitively data-filled in 2016. Whatever the site, they strongly suggest traits and paths which have no relevance to those dreamt in your innocent, early to mid-1960‘s adolescence. Just “facts,” as suggested by Sergeant Friday. The source is a half century gone. The boredom and inaccuracy unequivocally stated on the internet, at a personally repudiated cost of $3.95 per month, give you an idea for a meaningful book.
Page 687
You remember sophomore to senior year, reg-room Barbara.
Her first generation, ahead of their time, pill fortified, micro-minis, showed her perfect, meaty white, crossed, kissable legs to whoever had the audacity to risk being caught looking on at 9AM, Monday through Friday. What a way to start the school day; so much to learn. She often gave the hint of a smile, though you have almost no idea of the source of her amusement.
.............. Well, it’s better when she says it.
She always was a fantasy and dream which was denied to the body and heart of one so nerdy, shy and unattractive. You thought your tough, cool mask fooled the others. In a few unsuccessful attempts to say it in a general, indirect, non-accusatory way your mother warned of the hierarchy of appearance. “Those born with good looks can get away with anything. The others cannot do anything right.” She gently tried to prepare you to know that you were not one of the lucky ones.
You pretended not to understand, out of an aversion to being seen as pathetic, or perhaps, simply because you didn’t want to.
The mirror does often lie, you insisted.
Or perhaps it was because of Lydia, a beautiful, dark, half black, half Latino girl. She too was your identical thirteen years and in the eighth grade, who, with her tasty ancestry, rescued you from a fraudulent foray into the world of the cool, and brought you into the real, when she said; “You look good.
Page 688
Don’t act like no fag.” You only wished that she didn’t assume that a long term, black-white relationship could not be. It was 1962. The Communists were at our Southern door and they were packin’ heavy duty shit. Lydia lied and told you that everything would be all right. No one had ever heard of Viet Nam, unless they subscribed to French newspapers.
Happy Days; Fonzie and all that. With as promising a start as one could reasonably request; you of the now sick and dying generation are a child of another time. With plenty of company you rebelled against all forms of popular thought, emboldened by a righteous stand against the repressive, but unaware of what liberalism would spawn. The girls at the protests were dynamic and easy to approach.
Eventually you are forced to say; “Fuck politics and ideologies.” However, in the chosen absence of the one you truly love, the cruel passage of time has left horrendous, easily detectable scars. You still feel ugly, untalented, stupid, unwanted and pathetic and seek the warmth of blanketed sleep. To die is now the most desirable of erotic fantasies, and seems to be reserved for those more privileged. So, you laugh and cry as you sit alone and write that “meaningful” book.
Anxious to bask in the inevitable acclaim and maybe some well needed money, you put your electronic masterpiece on AmawayOnSteroids.Com for only $3.99 and wait. Two months later
Page 689
you are still waiting. You are perplexed and deign to do some research. You find that the story of this time has been told over and over and over again and that the only possible remaining readers want it in braille or have difficulty concentrating as they sit in the doctor’s waiting room hoping to find out that their constant inability to remember where they put the keys is not a sign of early Alzheimer’s. Distractedly, they stare at the pictures in “People Magazine,” amazed at how young all the celebrities are. A contemporary, best-selling author derides “mere descents into nostalgia.”
The young and middle-aged can’t relate at all. Interracial relationships have been commonplace for decades. Capitalistic Western Europe spends half their budgets on transfer payments.
Communist China manufactures half the goods consumed in the Western world, with double digit growth rates, which is attracting more capital. Vladimir Putin is the richest man on the planet. The bombs in Cuba which frightened your generation have now been replaced by the possibility of a terrorist carrying a nuclear bomb to the mainland. Abused and abandoned kids grow in numbers and degree of hatred. While the fossils may still recall the Jefferson Airplane singing; “Don’t you want somebody to love?” the young-uns favor the Insane Clown Posse’s numerous renditions of killing explosions, and necrophilia stimulated “eroticism” implying a “decadent” and played wish
Page 690
that the whole mess will imminently be blown up or cold fucked; supposedly; or at least as far as consistent low to mid-placement in the charts affords a living for the geriatric, badass devotees of makeup. School shootings have become a weekly event, no longer worthy of being leading “news.” Your generation worried about the few incidents when cops shot at demonstrators.
On YouTube Patti Smith’s beautiful rendition of “Cartwheels“
gets 423 viewings while some rapper saying that; “I’m gonna take her in the toilet and see how much she likes it” gets 42 million pops. There is only one other line to the five minute “song.”
“What’s up, dude?” sez the crackhead, male prostitute teenager.
“Fuck do I know,” sez you.
You begin to think that in order to sell books it might be wise to update your subject matter, but you don’t want to do anything rash.
It’s safe to say that we live in this moment. Seems a familiar phrase, etc., etc., etc. You don’t say it. You hope the others will say it for you. You can still appear to be elliptical, arty, sophisticated and wise saying nothing.
NOTHING. Has anyone ever been criticized for nothing? ..........
Come to think of it .................
Your creative juices flow. Books are chump change at best, unless they go movie, and a movie’s success is directly
Page 691
proportional to the interest of teenage boys. What do teenage boys like? .................... You can’t write that for fear of arrest and incarceration. ......... However zombies and vampires are tried and true, yet still somehow “in the moment.”
VAMBIE! A male zombie mates with a female vampire, producing a little girl they name Vambie. Being the product of an inter-species relationship, half her face and body is crumbling and the other half is pale white, side by side. She is depressed, but refuses to take any mind altering medication. She fits nowhere. She doesn’t know if she wants to drink the blood or eat the whole thing.
Her mother is often out all night which prompts Vambie and her father to suspect that something adulterous is going on. Dad is abusive as he takes his frustrations out on the little girl who has “one lascivious eye half like her Mom.”
She is ridiculed and bullied by her schoolmates. She spends hours in front of a mirror, wondering why she could not have been one of the fortunate good looking monsters, at the expense of her school work. As a result she is publicly humiliated by her teachers’ sarcastic taunts.
She is befriended by her male guidance counsellor. He too is a half breed, though he has “passed” as pure vampire, because his crumbling zombie half is below his belt. But he is now being exposed by a vicious female vampire teacher. After forty years
Page 692
of loneliness, he reached out to her and they recently “dated.”
She has since been laughing and gossiping to the other teachers about something crummy.
The guidance counsellor tells this to Vambie, who thinks that he is also ridiculing her. She cries and tries to get to the door, but he beats her there, shuts it and shows her his
“sincerity.” The duo decides to run away together. Without an income they soon become homeless. They find refuge in a church bell tower. But the constant vibration of the ringing bell accelerates the rate of deterioration of their zombie halves.
Seeing the end near they cry while holding each other, but break away disgusted at the other’s ugliness. They get revolvers from a gun dealing meth freak. On prom night they shoot his and her parents, the students and teachers at the school and then themselves simultaneously. Investigators find a co-signed note at the bell tower. “This is for all the ridiculed freaks. We will not be the only ones to suffer. JUSTICE.”
You have discovered through the experience with your first economically failing book that it is prudent to devote some time to research before you spend more of it filling in all the required details of another money adverse 300 page book. You find out that your “original” idea has been covered sixteen times in the past year alone, all available in e-form for $.99
or for free. Some used a male lead named Zompire, which sounds
Page 693
much more masculine. But all authors going the feminine route named her Vambie; one even using it for the title. While you were initially surprised and disappointed that your “original”
story was not so original, you take solace in the fact that you have learned that there are really only five to seven stories in the world. The object is merely to put your take on one of them.
You do copyright law research utilizing all of the two pages sent you by the vaguely threatening vanity publisher and the headache inducing hour on the web to learn one clear thing; that no one can own a word and that generally, no one can own a title. You can utilize Vambie and save her at the same time, sexual innuendo intended. Your aversion to easily detectable duplication surfaces and in an effort to do something with your
“vision” you read the first few free pages of each and see that the other renditions of the tale were done with a low or middle brow tone. Incomplete, ha ha. So, you decide to go high, immediately realizing that you have forfeited all chances of being an Oprah book of the month “winner.”
In all honesty, I know of no successful writers who write things like “Vambie,” but, I have seen many GFR indies do similar things. If you get on the right thread, and give it away for free, you’ll likely get a lot of four and five star reviews, and be called “cool” a few times. Wow!
Page 694
From my vast personal experience and research, I am certain that the subject matter is the single largest determinant of whether or not someone buys and likes a book. I have spent years acquiring every baseball book that came near me, and I only disliked one of them; one which was originally published in the twenties. It was so bad it’s hard to describe it. For approximately one-third of the book, the author seemed to be talking about baseball in a theoretical manner, without referencing any particular players, teams or games. For the other two-thirds I don’t know what he was writing about; other than weather, rain barrels, his grandpa’s fat belly and stuff like that. Until recently I thought that the writer was purposely doing the book poorly. Like maybe he had taken a non-refundable advance from some publisher he didn’t exactly adore.
But, now thanks to the literary education I’ve received on GFR, I lean toward the strong possibility that I missed something integral; it may well have been a meta baseball book. How inventive and how early on! I hope the author knows that GFR
indie reviewers would be gushing over it today.
To end with a serious note I do believe the subject matter is the primary force. But, it seems to be a moving target. If one dismisses the constant middling market for teen age
Page 695
romances, read by teenage girls and older women who think in a similar fashion, one is seemingly in a random world.
Consider the huge success of “The Martian.” It was written well enough, but probably won’t walk away with any rewards for that. The story was remarkably similar to that contained in a book which came out six years ago and went nowhere, as well as numerous stories in 1950’s and early 1960’s comic books. I’m at a loss for words.
This is a complete guess, and if I listed them, there would probably be more exceptions than proofs of the theorem. However, it does seem less than infrequent that a well written book with a surprising opening sells well. The reader is effectively made to believe that one thing is going on, to learn later that it’s another. Take one of James Patterson’s recent releases. James is estimated to be the highest income writer and I’m advised that he was truly once one of the best. In this opening the temporary main character is employed to feed animals at the zoo. This day he has left something of his in the lion’s cage. For thirty pages he considers all sorts of pluses and minuses to going in there unarmed to retrieve whatever it is. Finally he does, and the lion kills and eats him. Now, who would have expected that?
Page 696