Wannabe
ONE
It wasn’t a dark and stormy night. In fact, it was warm and cloudless. A night when the air tasted sweeter than honey and the cool breeze made the skin on your face tingle. It was the kind of night that Shakespeare had in mind when Romeo wooed the lovely Juliet looking down from her gilded cage. A night that a lame-ass boy band would sing a song about.
It was one of those nights.
Too bad that I had to die.
It wasn’t a romantic death. It was a blood and guts and tearing flesh and loosened bowels type of death. With me left on my stomach in a black pool of blood and piss and shit. Someone trying to hold my intestines in and my last breath is a cough and a gasp for air and a popping-splashing bubble of blood.
It was one of those deaths.
But wait. Hold on a second. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m trying to start my story at the end and then cleverly jump to the beginning and tell you how I got here. I hate those stories. I always get to the end and forget how it began. And then I’m left wondering, how did we get here? What did I miss out?
I read somewhere, in some interview with some famous author, that it’s all about character. You can write the scariest, most exciting scene and it won’t mean shit if the reader doesn’t care about your character. The reader needs to give a damn about the person whose dying in your big death scene or all your effort is useless, wasted. But if you’re reading this thinking you’re gonna get to the end and find out what a compassionate, giving, loving, caring person I am stop right now. It’s not gonna happen. I’m none of those things. You won’t cry for me.
Let me rather start in the middle. You’re probably wondering, why doesn’t he start at the beginning? Why doesn’t he tell us about before his life turned upside down and his reality altered to the point where he thought his drink had been spiked with LSD or he was wrapped tight in a white jacket in the corner of a room with soft walls? Why doesn’t he tell us that he got out of bed and brushed his nicotine-stained teeth and took a shower and rode the bus to his crappy job as a dishwasher in the kitchen of an Indian restaurant where each day he thought about how he was dying every second and that he’d wasted his life and blah blah blah.
No. Believe me, you don’t want to hear about it. It’s one of those beginnings.
TWO
I’m sitting in a tree. This is happening more and more these days. The moon looks like a slice of lemon. Or a toothless cartoon smile. Or a ‘have a nice day’ head chopped in half. I’m sniffing the air like a dog, picking up different scents.
Before this I was at home forcing down take-out Chinese noodles into my stomach. Eating what you would consider actual food seems like hard work these days. Like a heroin junkie shooting up with orange juice. I was watching some documentary on Errol Flynn. A dead Australian actor. I think I remember him playing Robin Hood or something. They were talking to some guy in this little town in Australia that Errol was born in saying how proud they were of him. They had tours that took tourists around the town showing them all the important places like where this guy was born or where he went to school or where he got his first blowjob and I was thinking, if this guy was a brain surgeon or a charity worker would they be so proud of him?
Scents appear as a mixture of colours and emotions. Fear looks like a muddy red and brown, lust is dark purple edged in black. From my nights in a tree reading scents I’ve only really picked up those two emotions. From people who want and those afraid they won’t get what they want.
My Chinese dinner of noodles and pork was self-afflicted torture. My superego force-feeding my stomach. I’m a little boy who eats all the spinach and broccoli on his plate before heading for the steak. I look down at the jogger below me. There goes my steak.
The wind changes direction and I feel a few drops of water on my nose. It’s not gonna rain, there isn’t a cloud in the sky, but two half-drops of water land on my face. This has happened to me before, I always used to look up at the sky and think that a bird had just pissed on me. Now I put it down as another one of those things that I’ll never bother to understand.
My steak heeds off into the distance and I wait. My steak has long blonde hair and two large bouncing breasts with nipples erect from the cool breeze. My steak is on her third circuit. Next time my steak passes I’ll leap down from the tree and startle her. She’ll look at my canine fangs and my bloodshot eyes and the world will be a different place all of a sudden. She’ll look at my hairy face and razor-sharp claws and everything she believed and took for granted won’t seem like shit after she hears my growl and sees my red gums bared and watches the saliva spastically convulse on my chin and fall into the sand.
Don’t be fooled. There are monsters living under your bed. There is a boogieman hiding in your closet. You’re all just Muggles but Harry Potter isn’t a sweet four-eyed kid with a wand. He’s a nasty little shit who is watching you this very moment, just waiting till you’re alone so he can wave his little stick and say a few magic words and make you think cockroaches are crawling over your skin and in your mouth and up your ass. Your parents lied to you. The world isn’t a nice place. So don’t tidy your room or eat your veggies or meet a girl or get a job. You’re not lucky to be alive. You’re a McDonalds burger walking around thinking you’re free. Get a gun and hide because things like me are looking for you. Just waiting for you to let your guard down.
Pretty dramatic, isn’t it.
My steak comes round again.
I leap from my perch and let out an involuntary shout. Her scream is abruptly cut off as I wrap my claws around her throat. She looks into my face and screams, “You are such a fucking idiot!”
THREE
We’re all just figments of our own imagination.
When I look at Dexter I see a hardcore guy with a lot of pent up anger and frustration and rage. I also see someone with too much of a brain. It’s not good to think too much these days. When Dexter looks at himself he sees someone totally different. The person he sees himself as isn’t the person I see and it definitely isn’t the person he actually is.
Dexter is sitting in the only sittable chair in the house. I’m on the couch. My backside almost touching the cold tiles on the floor. We’re watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Friday night and Dex is reading a comic book at the same time. Multi-tasking.
It’s funny how everyone today wants to get so much done so soon. If you’re only doing one thing you’re wasting time. It’s like people want to get more done with their lives so they multi-task and stress themselves out and shorten their lives by a decade or so. That’s why so many people are getting heart attacks at thirty. By multi-tasking and doing three things at once nothing ever gets done completely. When we’re sleeping we’re plotting our lives, structuring our five-year plan. Don’t bother, it’s not going to be good enough. You’ll never earn enough money or have a big enough television. Your wife will never be hot enough and your kids won’t ever do well enough. If you want to be proud of your children one day don’t imagine them ever being more than a dishwasher or a street cleaner. When you sleep, sleep. When you eat, eat. Get some focus. Stop trying to do everything at once. The greatest cause of death in the first world is multi-tasking.
“So,” says Dexter, “she was really pissed off?” This is what the great philosophers like Socrates and Kant called a rhetorical question.
I laugh and nod my head, “She called me a ‘fucking idiot’.” We’re talking about how I scared the shit out of my girlfriend again.
I was on an adventure.
Last night I was a werewolf.
It’s like after you watch From Dusk Till Dawn and for the next two days you’re George Clooney pointing a gun in someone’s face going, “Just be cool. You, BE COOL!”
I hardly watch television. If someone broke into my flat on Saturday and stole the TV I wouldn’t notice until five o’clock Friday when Dexter and I sat down to watch Buffy. Most nights I make up my own shows. I’ll be a government assassin or a vampire hunter. Last night I was a werewolf, again. I attacked a jogger, again. That jogger was Clarabell, again.
She’s not really my girlfriend. In fact, she hates my guts. Clarabell works at the same restaurant I do as the night manager. She goes to the gym and moisturises and buys expensive clothes. She works so hard at being beautiful you’ve got to wonder what’s wrong with her inside. Last night was the third time I’d grown hair and fangs and jumped down at her from a tree. She might think I’m a freak and a loser and an annoying little cunt but, hey, at least she notices me now. And I figure with all the uphill she gives me at work these days the rest of the staff have got to think that there’s some sexual tension there. And you just know that in their heads they’re imagining that after work when everyone’s left and she locks up we get naked and fuck like bunnies on the buffet table.
Who are you really but what other people perceive you as? To those people at work I was some ugly dude who doesn’t say much and washes the cutlery but now I’m this hot-to-trot fuck-machine with a monster dick that women can’t get enough of.
“So what are you thinking when you do this shit?” asks Dex.
I tell him I don’t know. I tell him that my life is so pointless and boring that I figure these are sort of like little missions to pass the time until I die. I tell him that, honestly, these missions are getting kind of old. It’s not enough to have an exciting life, your life has to have some meaning. Being a werewolf is fun, but it’s kind of juvenile and stupid. I need a bigger mission. If I’m going to save the world I’d better start now ‘coz I’m not getting any younger.
FOUR
Okay, this is me setting the scene. I live in a place called Cape Town, South Africa. You’ve probably read a lot about us in paper. You probably think, it’s a nice place to visit, etcetera. This place is what the political spin-doctors call ‘the rainbow nation’. In reality it’s a place that is trying to be so politically correct that every single person is a frustrated time bomb just about ready to implode. We’re at the tip of a continent that is dying from Aids and starvation. Crime and corruption have become so bad that people joke about it. Our president tells us that HIV doesn’t cause Aids, poverty causes Aids. In that case, lets kill all the poor people and destroy the pandemic. In that case, how can we be sure that smoking causes cancer?
The place I work, I’m the only white person in the kitchen. When I’m washing dishes, I’m washing dishes. Totally focused. There’s not much to get distracted by when no one else speaks your language. Or rather, they do speak your language but they don’t. I asked once what they wanted to do with their lives. When they were young, I asked, did they dream about being an underpaid cook or dishwasher? They stared at me like I’d asked them about quantum mechanics until one woman said, “When I was young I wanted to be white.”
When I’m not so totally Zenned out washing dishes I’m watching the lovely Clarabell’s lips move as she barks at me about how I chipped a dinner plate or broke a glass and it’s coming off my wages. To her I’m a poor, worthless freak of nature who she’s just dying to fire from my shit job. She thinks I’m lazy and not doing anything with my life and I suppose I don’t disagree with her but I think, what’s so special about being a restaurant manager? We’re both the same, neither of us really matter, she just gets paid more.
It’s not important that you’re content with your life. No one wants happiness anymore. Happiness is other people thinking you must be so happy. Your job is only as good as how good other people think it is. Enough money is more money than you have at the moment.
While Clarabell is shouting at me I’m thinking about how last night I was a hunter. How last night I was a creature from what would be her worst nightmares if she had nightmares this bad. How I’m half werewolf and half vampire and every woman looks like my centuries dead wife that I loved but killed and my wife looked just like her. Hey, it might sound mental to you but to me it sounds a lot more exciting than I’m a dishwasher who’s in love with a woman who used to not notice him but now thinks he’s a retarded, worthless, psycho fuck-up and he thinks this is better because at least now she notices him.
My life needs some excitement. We’re all just figments of our own imagination.
FIVE
It’s Monday night and I’m on a mission.
I’m a genetically engineered clone trained to be the perfect assassin.
I used to just walk around and pretend. I’d pretend I was a werewolf or a superhuman or whatever and I’d just walk around. Pretty sad, I’d agree.
Tonight, however, Dexter’s agreed to be a part of my little fantasyland. In my head he’s a rogue agent who’s slipping secrets to my government’s enemies. My mission is to kill him.
I phone around and find out where he’s gonna be. Some nightclub. When I’m told the place appears in my head but the name charges straight out.
I once tried a typical male fantasy. I was a pornstar. My donkey looked like the tube on one of those pool-vacuums. The fantasy didn’t work for me because I kept imagining the director saying stop and then I had to hold on until he moved the camera so he could get a shot from my butt rising and falling. Sure, I was on top of some big-breasted hottie but everywhere behind the cameras were people. The director, the cameraman, the girl who made the tea and coffee. It didn’t work for me.
I’m in the nightclub where intel told me the traitor would be. I order a drink and light up a cigarette. I couldn’t bring anything like a gun or a knife in here but that’s okay. I’m a highly trained, genetically engineered assassin. A master of hand-to-hand combat.
I see Dexter coming down the stairs. Intel told me he loved dancing. The dance floor is upstairs so I positioned myself at the bar just behind the stairs. I smoke my cigarette right down to the filter and watch Dexter work his way through the crowd to the bathroom.
I burn my lips on the last drag and stub my smoke out. I always smoke right down to the filter. I figure there are millions of stressed-out children in Africa who don’t have access to cigarettes so I’m not gonna waste any tobacco.
Dexter’s been in the bathroom for a minute now. I leave my beer on the bar and head in for the kill. He’s alone in there. Washing his hands at the basin. He sees me in the mirror behind him and says, “Hey, how’s it going?” I grab him around the neck with my arm, I’m here to kill him, I say. I tell him it’s nothing personal, just business.
Dexter slams his elbow into my ribs hard. I stumble back and hit the wall behind me. “You’re not serious?” he asks.
I swing my fist for his head. He blocks it, twists my arm behind my back, and pushes me onto the ground. He shakes his head as I slip on piss and water and get to my feet, “Man,” he says, “you are so fucked up.” He turns to leave and I dive onto his back, pushing the both of us out the bathroom door.
Dexter hits the ground hard with me on top of him. People stop and stare and wonder what the fuck is going on. I get up and kick Dex in the ribs. He does some fancy-twisty thing on the floor and sweeps my legs out from under me. He gets to his feet as the bouncers rush in to see what’s going on.
If you’re wondering what Dexter does for a living I’ll tell you. He’s a karate instructor with I don’t know how many belts above black. He won’t hurt me too much because he knows what kind of damage he can do. I look at his face and can see the relief that the bouncers are here. Now he won’t have to hurt me.
A giant, black-haired Cro-Magnon tells me, “Get out.”
I can’t do that, I say. This has nothing to do with them, I say. I don’t want to hurt them, I say.
The bouncer grabs my shoulder and I land a punch on his chin. I’m a super-assassin with a mission. I’m programmed to fulfil my objective or die trying. I’m unconscious on the floor.
SIX
I’m washing dishes with a broken nose and the right side of my face so swollen. I’m Brad Pitt in Fight Club.
The kitchen staff talk amongst themselves in a language I don’t understand. In this country everyone lives together now but they still live in different worlds. Black people think the whites are lazy and rich, white people think the blacks are lazy and stupid. The white people talk to the black people slowly, the way you talk to someone from another country. Can… I… help… you? The black people who are so stupid speak four or more languages. Your language is probably their third and you think you’re the smart one. Most white people speak English and have money. That makes them smarter. Money, the difference between eccentric and insane.
I carry the dishes from the kitchen to the bar. Nice and clean. I’m so into my Brad Pitt fantasy, my Fight Club fantasy, that I’ve licked the rims of most of the glasses. After tonight every person here will have had my tongue in their mouth.
While I’m packing the glasses on the shelf one slips out of my hand and crashes onto the ground. The restaurant goes silent until some funny guy starts clapping his hands. You just know this is the same guy who’ll ask for the William when he wants the bill. The entire restaurant looks at me and laughs as I walk back into the kitchen with Clarabell behind me. Cool, some quality time with my girlfriend.
The way motorists slow down to gawk at an accident, the way patrons stop and look at you when you drop a dish on the floor and make a loud noise, the way the world is attracted to chaos. Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden are all just misunderstood. They just wanted some attention. And not everyone hates a terrorist, just look at all those people protesting about George Bush sending troops into Afghanistan. They’re all telling us that war never solved anything. Talk to my grandfather about that, if it wasn’t for World War Two we’d all be goose-stepping and growing little shit-staches under our noses.
“That’s coming off your wages!” she shouts at me.
“Okay,” I say.
“And what’s with your face?” she shouts, “I can’t have you looking like that for work.”
She thinks I’m ugly now. When my face heals she’ll still think I’m ugly but not as ugly as I could be. If you want to be attractive, hang out with someone who isn’t.
“Sorry,” I say.
The guys in the kitchen all smile at me from behind Clarabell’s back. They know what goes on after the doors get locked. When the lights are off and the place is empty this bitch who makes my life hell gets naked and lies on a table where someone was thirty minutes ago eating curry. In their minds she writhes and moans my name with me on top of her and my white ass rising and falling.
“Just sort yourself out,” she turns and stamps toward the kitchen door. Before she leaves she stops outside the door, breathes in and out, plasters a smile on her face, and walks back into the restaurant. Looking calm and collected.
It’s not who you are that matters, it’s who people think you are.
SEVEN
Dexter asks, “So how’s the face?”
I tell him it’s okay. Still a bit sensitive but I like it. “You’re lucky those guys came in,” I say, “or you would be a dead man.”
We’re sitting in my flat drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and reading comic books. I’ve got hundreds of them. Superman, Batman, Grifter, Team 7, Justice League of America. Hundreds of stories about lives more exciting than mine. Why have kids when you can live vicariously through fictional superheroes.
Spawn is a guy who died and gave his soul to the Devil so he could see his wife one last time. I should have so much fun.
Dexter and me share a flat. I’d like to think I’m Edward Norton in Fight Club and he’s just my imaginary friend showing me the way to enlightenment but I know that kind of stuff just doesn’t happen to me. Once something has been made into a movie or written about in a book it just can’t happen. My theory is that if the Matrix existed, if we were just human batteries powering a supercomputer, then the machines would create this movie and make it so good and popular that anyone finding out about this mechanical conspiracy would be laughed at. Dude, people would say, get a grip, that’s just a movie.
“So what’s on TV tonight?” asks Dex. He’s not talking about the inane shows on the Panasonic in our living room, he’s talking about the show I’ve got planned for myself tonight.
Why have kids when you can live vicariously through your fucked-up buddy?
I don’t know if Dexter will get the same thing from my fantasies that I do. I mean, it’s all in my head really. I don’t expect anyone else to see it my way.
It’s like no one will ever read a book the way you do. Unless the author explains every minute detail about everything, and not even then, will anyone see the same thing you do.
“I don’t know,” I say. I tell him I’m getting a bit bored by it myself. I think of how I haven’t ‘wolfed-out’ and hunted Clarabell in a while. I wonder if she misses me.
“So crank it up a bit,” says Dex, “you were talking about saving the world the other night.”
Was I? I don’t really remember.
“I know you,” says Dexter, “this is who you really want to be.” He holds up the Batman comic he’s reading.
Okay, I tell him, but not tonight. Tonight I’m the Lukos. I’m half werewolf, half vampire. And I’ve had my broccoli and cabbage and beetroot and I’m dying for some steak.
EIGHT
The smell of fear is everywhere tonight. Like a thick, wet mist. Like the stench of a wet dog. The red-brown-black smell of terror hangs in the air.
God, I’m such a hack.
I’m on my perch, high above the ground, watching Clarabell, my steak, huffing and puffing and panting as she runs round and round. Wasting so much time and energy and getting nowhere.
My eyes are so red and my teeth are so sharp. My entire body is covered in hard, black hair.
This is so much better than real life.
I’m sick of this ‘be yourself’ crap I hear all the time. As if being me was so fucking fantastic they’re selling raffle tickets for the privilege. I’m a twenty-five year old loser with no friends who works as a dishwasher for less than minimum wage. To every teacher I ever had, to my parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts I’m a failure and a letdown. But I guess everyone’s got a sad story, so just deal with it.
Before I met Clarabell I just used to pretend. I’d get into character and walk around and pretend I was a scientist sent form the future studying life in the early twenty first century. Pretend I was the reincarnation of a legendary Norse warrior. Pretend I was someone.
Clarabell was the trigger. The girl with a name someone would give to a cow. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
She was the one who took my fantasies up a notch.
My steak. My trigger. My love runs around the park for the fourth time and I’m out of the tree and flying through the air.
NINE
“Are your nuts okay?” asks Dexter.
I rub my balls and say, “I think it’s the first time she’s touched me.”
Last night, when I landed growling like a dog in front of Clarabell, she didn’t call me an idiot or a loser or any of those things. She silently but forcefully placed her foot between my legs.
“Oh well,” smiles Dex, “you always hurt the ones you love.”
There’s this girl I work with, one of the waitresses, who’s usually so happy and bubbly and happy all the time. Like if you asked her what time it was she’d always say, “It’s time to give your heart to Jesus!” This girl, she’s a veritable fountain of what I call ‘keyring philosophy’. She’s always full of gems like, “You only have one chance to make a first impression” or, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
My motto is: If at first you don’t succeed, lower your standards.
My motto is: If you do your best, people will expect it from you all the time.
My motto is: Every silver lining has a cloud.
Anyway, this girl was always telling me about her perfect most perfectest perfect boyfriend who was just so perfect he was perfect. Until she found out that her perfect perfection was perfectly fucking her bestest of best best friends.
My motto is: Always expect the worst and you’ll never be disappointed.
So I thought, if I’m going to save the world I’d better start small. First work out those important, abstract ideals. Tonight I’m starting with Justice.
This girl has shown me so many pictures of this perfect guy I think I’m assaulted by his face more times a day than the Coke logo. The Nike swish. The big yellow M.
I’ve seen him around at this club in town. I always wondered what he would say if he knew that his girlfriend worked with an alien/human hybrid sent to pave the way for the Earth’s destruction.
Anyway, this girl has told me so much about this guy. Every detail of his life. So I go to this club he hangs out at and tell him I’m Mr Whoever’s son. I’m his boss’s son and I’ve seen him around the office and I’m on a drinking binge tonight and he’s just joined the party.
Dexter’s standing next to me. Smiling like he’s hanging out with this guy’s boss’s rich son and the drinks are flowing freely.
I don’t earn much so I’m not gonna spend a fortune getting Mr Perfect drunk. Instead a slip a Rohypnol, a date rape drug, into the first beer I buy this guy.
A couple of beers later he’s stumbling around and I tell him he’s in no state to drive home but not to worry, his new best buddy, his boss’s son, is going to make sure he gets home safe and sound.
We’re at my place and while I work Mr Perfect’s pants and underpants down to his knees Dexter is unscrewing the light bulb we’ve left burning the whole evening.
Dexter drops the bulb onto the bed and sticks his burnt fingers in his mouth. I get a dishtowel from the kitchen so I can pick the bulb up.
The girl I work with told me in tears that when her perfect boyfriend broke up with her and she asked him why he told her it was because she wouldn’t sleep with him. She’s still a virgin and was saving herself until marriage.
My motto is: Everybody’s got a sad story.
My motto is: All love is conditional.
Even your parent’s.
Even God’s.
Dexter is looking away holding Mr Perfect’s butt-cheeks open. I hold the hot bulb with the dishtowel and carefully squeeze it tight in his hole. He moans a bit but is so wasted and knocked out that he can’t struggle.
“It’s okay,” I whisper in his ear, “this will all be over in no time.”
Not tomorrow. Not the next day. But maybe three or four days later the memory of those words will drift back into the conscious part of his mind.
The screw-end of the bulb, pardon the pun, burns his hole red and sore. When I step back I think it looks a bit like a solar eclipse. A black spot with red fire around the edges. I pull his pants up and Dexter and I drag him back downstairs and out to the car.
We drive into a part of town with four or five gay clubs next to and across from each other. It’s about three thirty on a Wednesday morning and the street is deserted.
I pull the perfect little faggot bitch out of the backseat and yank his pants down. Tomorrow morning he’s gonna wake up not knowing how he got here around all these gay clubs with his pants around his ankles and his hole on fire like he’s been pounded from behind by six hundred and sixty six Godzilla-big penises and his whole world will be a different, scary, shameful place.
Poor baby.
My motto is: If sex is a pain in the arse you’re doing it wrong.
TEN
Dexter sits in the middle of the living room in the lotus position facing a small statue of the Buddha. Next to the fat, happy, enlightened little guy burns tangerine scented incense. Dexter’s back and shoulders are straight, his head is tilted slightly forward, and he’s counting his breaths in his head.
Breathe in – one.
Breathe out – two.
In – three.
Out – four.
Dexter says last night built up a lot of good karma for us.
He says after our little mission as champions of justice we’re closer to coming back as more enlightened beings.
I’m sitting on the couch quietly reading a comic book.
Green Lantern is a guy who has this power-ring that is the most powerful weapon in the universe. He can create anything he wants and all it takes is willpower. Me, I can’t even quit smoking.
According to Buddha humans are sentient beings. Unlike animals, apparently, we humans have the ability to reach satori, enlightenment, ultimate happiness.
The person who wants nothing has everything.
I find that a bit hard to swallow. I think we’ve got it all wrong. We’re the least evolved species. Think about it, a camel doesn’t want a bigger house or a faster car or a better job. A gorilla doesn’t hoard
It wasn’t a dark and stormy night. In fact, it was warm and cloudless. A night when the air tasted sweeter than honey and the cool breeze made the skin on your face tingle. It was the kind of night that Shakespeare had in mind when Romeo wooed the lovely Juliet looking down from her gilded cage. A night that a lame-ass boy band would sing a song about.
It was one of those nights.
Too bad that I had to die.
It wasn’t a romantic death. It was a blood and guts and tearing flesh and loosened bowels type of death. With me left on my stomach in a black pool of blood and piss and shit. Someone trying to hold my intestines in and my last breath is a cough and a gasp for air and a popping-splashing bubble of blood.
It was one of those deaths.
But wait. Hold on a second. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m trying to start my story at the end and then cleverly jump to the beginning and tell you how I got here. I hate those stories. I always get to the end and forget how it began. And then I’m left wondering, how did we get here? What did I miss out?
I read somewhere, in some interview with some famous author, that it’s all about character. You can write the scariest, most exciting scene and it won’t mean shit if the reader doesn’t care about your character. The reader needs to give a damn about the person whose dying in your big death scene or all your effort is useless, wasted. But if you’re reading this thinking you’re gonna get to the end and find out what a compassionate, giving, loving, caring person I am stop right now. It’s not gonna happen. I’m none of those things. You won’t cry for me.
Let me rather start in the middle. You’re probably wondering, why doesn’t he start at the beginning? Why doesn’t he tell us about before his life turned upside down and his reality altered to the point where he thought his drink had been spiked with LSD or he was wrapped tight in a white jacket in the corner of a room with soft walls? Why doesn’t he tell us that he got out of bed and brushed his nicotine-stained teeth and took a shower and rode the bus to his crappy job as a dishwasher in the kitchen of an Indian restaurant where each day he thought about how he was dying every second and that he’d wasted his life and blah blah blah.
No. Believe me, you don’t want to hear about it. It’s one of those beginnings.
TWO
I’m sitting in a tree. This is happening more and more these days. The moon looks like a slice of lemon. Or a toothless cartoon smile. Or a ‘have a nice day’ head chopped in half. I’m sniffing the air like a dog, picking up different scents.
Before this I was at home forcing down take-out Chinese noodles into my stomach. Eating what you would consider actual food seems like hard work these days. Like a heroin junkie shooting up with orange juice. I was watching some documentary on Errol Flynn. A dead Australian actor. I think I remember him playing Robin Hood or something. They were talking to some guy in this little town in Australia that Errol was born in saying how proud they were of him. They had tours that took tourists around the town showing them all the important places like where this guy was born or where he went to school or where he got his first blowjob and I was thinking, if this guy was a brain surgeon or a charity worker would they be so proud of him?
Scents appear as a mixture of colours and emotions. Fear looks like a muddy red and brown, lust is dark purple edged in black. From my nights in a tree reading scents I’ve only really picked up those two emotions. From people who want and those afraid they won’t get what they want.
My Chinese dinner of noodles and pork was self-afflicted torture. My superego force-feeding my stomach. I’m a little boy who eats all the spinach and broccoli on his plate before heading for the steak. I look down at the jogger below me. There goes my steak.
The wind changes direction and I feel a few drops of water on my nose. It’s not gonna rain, there isn’t a cloud in the sky, but two half-drops of water land on my face. This has happened to me before, I always used to look up at the sky and think that a bird had just pissed on me. Now I put it down as another one of those things that I’ll never bother to understand.
My steak heeds off into the distance and I wait. My steak has long blonde hair and two large bouncing breasts with nipples erect from the cool breeze. My steak is on her third circuit. Next time my steak passes I’ll leap down from the tree and startle her. She’ll look at my canine fangs and my bloodshot eyes and the world will be a different place all of a sudden. She’ll look at my hairy face and razor-sharp claws and everything she believed and took for granted won’t seem like shit after she hears my growl and sees my red gums bared and watches the saliva spastically convulse on my chin and fall into the sand.
Don’t be fooled. There are monsters living under your bed. There is a boogieman hiding in your closet. You’re all just Muggles but Harry Potter isn’t a sweet four-eyed kid with a wand. He’s a nasty little shit who is watching you this very moment, just waiting till you’re alone so he can wave his little stick and say a few magic words and make you think cockroaches are crawling over your skin and in your mouth and up your ass. Your parents lied to you. The world isn’t a nice place. So don’t tidy your room or eat your veggies or meet a girl or get a job. You’re not lucky to be alive. You’re a McDonalds burger walking around thinking you’re free. Get a gun and hide because things like me are looking for you. Just waiting for you to let your guard down.
Pretty dramatic, isn’t it.
My steak comes round again.
I leap from my perch and let out an involuntary shout. Her scream is abruptly cut off as I wrap my claws around her throat. She looks into my face and screams, “You are such a fucking idiot!”
THREE
We’re all just figments of our own imagination.
When I look at Dexter I see a hardcore guy with a lot of pent up anger and frustration and rage. I also see someone with too much of a brain. It’s not good to think too much these days. When Dexter looks at himself he sees someone totally different. The person he sees himself as isn’t the person I see and it definitely isn’t the person he actually is.
Dexter is sitting in the only sittable chair in the house. I’m on the couch. My backside almost touching the cold tiles on the floor. We’re watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Friday night and Dex is reading a comic book at the same time. Multi-tasking.
It’s funny how everyone today wants to get so much done so soon. If you’re only doing one thing you’re wasting time. It’s like people want to get more done with their lives so they multi-task and stress themselves out and shorten their lives by a decade or so. That’s why so many people are getting heart attacks at thirty. By multi-tasking and doing three things at once nothing ever gets done completely. When we’re sleeping we’re plotting our lives, structuring our five-year plan. Don’t bother, it’s not going to be good enough. You’ll never earn enough money or have a big enough television. Your wife will never be hot enough and your kids won’t ever do well enough. If you want to be proud of your children one day don’t imagine them ever being more than a dishwasher or a street cleaner. When you sleep, sleep. When you eat, eat. Get some focus. Stop trying to do everything at once. The greatest cause of death in the first world is multi-tasking.
“So,” says Dexter, “she was really pissed off?” This is what the great philosophers like Socrates and Kant called a rhetorical question.
I laugh and nod my head, “She called me a ‘fucking idiot’.” We’re talking about how I scared the shit out of my girlfriend again.
I was on an adventure.
Last night I was a werewolf.
It’s like after you watch From Dusk Till Dawn and for the next two days you’re George Clooney pointing a gun in someone’s face going, “Just be cool. You, BE COOL!”
I hardly watch television. If someone broke into my flat on Saturday and stole the TV I wouldn’t notice until five o’clock Friday when Dexter and I sat down to watch Buffy. Most nights I make up my own shows. I’ll be a government assassin or a vampire hunter. Last night I was a werewolf, again. I attacked a jogger, again. That jogger was Clarabell, again.
She’s not really my girlfriend. In fact, she hates my guts. Clarabell works at the same restaurant I do as the night manager. She goes to the gym and moisturises and buys expensive clothes. She works so hard at being beautiful you’ve got to wonder what’s wrong with her inside. Last night was the third time I’d grown hair and fangs and jumped down at her from a tree. She might think I’m a freak and a loser and an annoying little cunt but, hey, at least she notices me now. And I figure with all the uphill she gives me at work these days the rest of the staff have got to think that there’s some sexual tension there. And you just know that in their heads they’re imagining that after work when everyone’s left and she locks up we get naked and fuck like bunnies on the buffet table.
Who are you really but what other people perceive you as? To those people at work I was some ugly dude who doesn’t say much and washes the cutlery but now I’m this hot-to-trot fuck-machine with a monster dick that women can’t get enough of.
“So what are you thinking when you do this shit?” asks Dex.
I tell him I don’t know. I tell him that my life is so pointless and boring that I figure these are sort of like little missions to pass the time until I die. I tell him that, honestly, these missions are getting kind of old. It’s not enough to have an exciting life, your life has to have some meaning. Being a werewolf is fun, but it’s kind of juvenile and stupid. I need a bigger mission. If I’m going to save the world I’d better start now ‘coz I’m not getting any younger.
FOUR
Okay, this is me setting the scene. I live in a place called Cape Town, South Africa. You’ve probably read a lot about us in paper. You probably think, it’s a nice place to visit, etcetera. This place is what the political spin-doctors call ‘the rainbow nation’. In reality it’s a place that is trying to be so politically correct that every single person is a frustrated time bomb just about ready to implode. We’re at the tip of a continent that is dying from Aids and starvation. Crime and corruption have become so bad that people joke about it. Our president tells us that HIV doesn’t cause Aids, poverty causes Aids. In that case, lets kill all the poor people and destroy the pandemic. In that case, how can we be sure that smoking causes cancer?
The place I work, I’m the only white person in the kitchen. When I’m washing dishes, I’m washing dishes. Totally focused. There’s not much to get distracted by when no one else speaks your language. Or rather, they do speak your language but they don’t. I asked once what they wanted to do with their lives. When they were young, I asked, did they dream about being an underpaid cook or dishwasher? They stared at me like I’d asked them about quantum mechanics until one woman said, “When I was young I wanted to be white.”
When I’m not so totally Zenned out washing dishes I’m watching the lovely Clarabell’s lips move as she barks at me about how I chipped a dinner plate or broke a glass and it’s coming off my wages. To her I’m a poor, worthless freak of nature who she’s just dying to fire from my shit job. She thinks I’m lazy and not doing anything with my life and I suppose I don’t disagree with her but I think, what’s so special about being a restaurant manager? We’re both the same, neither of us really matter, she just gets paid more.
It’s not important that you’re content with your life. No one wants happiness anymore. Happiness is other people thinking you must be so happy. Your job is only as good as how good other people think it is. Enough money is more money than you have at the moment.
While Clarabell is shouting at me I’m thinking about how last night I was a hunter. How last night I was a creature from what would be her worst nightmares if she had nightmares this bad. How I’m half werewolf and half vampire and every woman looks like my centuries dead wife that I loved but killed and my wife looked just like her. Hey, it might sound mental to you but to me it sounds a lot more exciting than I’m a dishwasher who’s in love with a woman who used to not notice him but now thinks he’s a retarded, worthless, psycho fuck-up and he thinks this is better because at least now she notices him.
My life needs some excitement. We’re all just figments of our own imagination.
FIVE
It’s Monday night and I’m on a mission.
I’m a genetically engineered clone trained to be the perfect assassin.
I used to just walk around and pretend. I’d pretend I was a werewolf or a superhuman or whatever and I’d just walk around. Pretty sad, I’d agree.
Tonight, however, Dexter’s agreed to be a part of my little fantasyland. In my head he’s a rogue agent who’s slipping secrets to my government’s enemies. My mission is to kill him.
I phone around and find out where he’s gonna be. Some nightclub. When I’m told the place appears in my head but the name charges straight out.
I once tried a typical male fantasy. I was a pornstar. My donkey looked like the tube on one of those pool-vacuums. The fantasy didn’t work for me because I kept imagining the director saying stop and then I had to hold on until he moved the camera so he could get a shot from my butt rising and falling. Sure, I was on top of some big-breasted hottie but everywhere behind the cameras were people. The director, the cameraman, the girl who made the tea and coffee. It didn’t work for me.
I’m in the nightclub where intel told me the traitor would be. I order a drink and light up a cigarette. I couldn’t bring anything like a gun or a knife in here but that’s okay. I’m a highly trained, genetically engineered assassin. A master of hand-to-hand combat.
I see Dexter coming down the stairs. Intel told me he loved dancing. The dance floor is upstairs so I positioned myself at the bar just behind the stairs. I smoke my cigarette right down to the filter and watch Dexter work his way through the crowd to the bathroom.
I burn my lips on the last drag and stub my smoke out. I always smoke right down to the filter. I figure there are millions of stressed-out children in Africa who don’t have access to cigarettes so I’m not gonna waste any tobacco.
Dexter’s been in the bathroom for a minute now. I leave my beer on the bar and head in for the kill. He’s alone in there. Washing his hands at the basin. He sees me in the mirror behind him and says, “Hey, how’s it going?” I grab him around the neck with my arm, I’m here to kill him, I say. I tell him it’s nothing personal, just business.
Dexter slams his elbow into my ribs hard. I stumble back and hit the wall behind me. “You’re not serious?” he asks.
I swing my fist for his head. He blocks it, twists my arm behind my back, and pushes me onto the ground. He shakes his head as I slip on piss and water and get to my feet, “Man,” he says, “you are so fucked up.” He turns to leave and I dive onto his back, pushing the both of us out the bathroom door.
Dexter hits the ground hard with me on top of him. People stop and stare and wonder what the fuck is going on. I get up and kick Dex in the ribs. He does some fancy-twisty thing on the floor and sweeps my legs out from under me. He gets to his feet as the bouncers rush in to see what’s going on.
If you’re wondering what Dexter does for a living I’ll tell you. He’s a karate instructor with I don’t know how many belts above black. He won’t hurt me too much because he knows what kind of damage he can do. I look at his face and can see the relief that the bouncers are here. Now he won’t have to hurt me.
A giant, black-haired Cro-Magnon tells me, “Get out.”
I can’t do that, I say. This has nothing to do with them, I say. I don’t want to hurt them, I say.
The bouncer grabs my shoulder and I land a punch on his chin. I’m a super-assassin with a mission. I’m programmed to fulfil my objective or die trying. I’m unconscious on the floor.
SIX
I’m washing dishes with a broken nose and the right side of my face so swollen. I’m Brad Pitt in Fight Club.
The kitchen staff talk amongst themselves in a language I don’t understand. In this country everyone lives together now but they still live in different worlds. Black people think the whites are lazy and rich, white people think the blacks are lazy and stupid. The white people talk to the black people slowly, the way you talk to someone from another country. Can… I… help… you? The black people who are so stupid speak four or more languages. Your language is probably their third and you think you’re the smart one. Most white people speak English and have money. That makes them smarter. Money, the difference between eccentric and insane.
I carry the dishes from the kitchen to the bar. Nice and clean. I’m so into my Brad Pitt fantasy, my Fight Club fantasy, that I’ve licked the rims of most of the glasses. After tonight every person here will have had my tongue in their mouth.
While I’m packing the glasses on the shelf one slips out of my hand and crashes onto the ground. The restaurant goes silent until some funny guy starts clapping his hands. You just know this is the same guy who’ll ask for the William when he wants the bill. The entire restaurant looks at me and laughs as I walk back into the kitchen with Clarabell behind me. Cool, some quality time with my girlfriend.
The way motorists slow down to gawk at an accident, the way patrons stop and look at you when you drop a dish on the floor and make a loud noise, the way the world is attracted to chaos. Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden are all just misunderstood. They just wanted some attention. And not everyone hates a terrorist, just look at all those people protesting about George Bush sending troops into Afghanistan. They’re all telling us that war never solved anything. Talk to my grandfather about that, if it wasn’t for World War Two we’d all be goose-stepping and growing little shit-staches under our noses.
“That’s coming off your wages!” she shouts at me.
“Okay,” I say.
“And what’s with your face?” she shouts, “I can’t have you looking like that for work.”
She thinks I’m ugly now. When my face heals she’ll still think I’m ugly but not as ugly as I could be. If you want to be attractive, hang out with someone who isn’t.
“Sorry,” I say.
The guys in the kitchen all smile at me from behind Clarabell’s back. They know what goes on after the doors get locked. When the lights are off and the place is empty this bitch who makes my life hell gets naked and lies on a table where someone was thirty minutes ago eating curry. In their minds she writhes and moans my name with me on top of her and my white ass rising and falling.
“Just sort yourself out,” she turns and stamps toward the kitchen door. Before she leaves she stops outside the door, breathes in and out, plasters a smile on her face, and walks back into the restaurant. Looking calm and collected.
It’s not who you are that matters, it’s who people think you are.
SEVEN
Dexter asks, “So how’s the face?”
I tell him it’s okay. Still a bit sensitive but I like it. “You’re lucky those guys came in,” I say, “or you would be a dead man.”
We’re sitting in my flat drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and reading comic books. I’ve got hundreds of them. Superman, Batman, Grifter, Team 7, Justice League of America. Hundreds of stories about lives more exciting than mine. Why have kids when you can live vicariously through fictional superheroes.
Spawn is a guy who died and gave his soul to the Devil so he could see his wife one last time. I should have so much fun.
Dexter and me share a flat. I’d like to think I’m Edward Norton in Fight Club and he’s just my imaginary friend showing me the way to enlightenment but I know that kind of stuff just doesn’t happen to me. Once something has been made into a movie or written about in a book it just can’t happen. My theory is that if the Matrix existed, if we were just human batteries powering a supercomputer, then the machines would create this movie and make it so good and popular that anyone finding out about this mechanical conspiracy would be laughed at. Dude, people would say, get a grip, that’s just a movie.
“So what’s on TV tonight?” asks Dex. He’s not talking about the inane shows on the Panasonic in our living room, he’s talking about the show I’ve got planned for myself tonight.
Why have kids when you can live vicariously through your fucked-up buddy?
I don’t know if Dexter will get the same thing from my fantasies that I do. I mean, it’s all in my head really. I don’t expect anyone else to see it my way.
It’s like no one will ever read a book the way you do. Unless the author explains every minute detail about everything, and not even then, will anyone see the same thing you do.
“I don’t know,” I say. I tell him I’m getting a bit bored by it myself. I think of how I haven’t ‘wolfed-out’ and hunted Clarabell in a while. I wonder if she misses me.
“So crank it up a bit,” says Dex, “you were talking about saving the world the other night.”
Was I? I don’t really remember.
“I know you,” says Dexter, “this is who you really want to be.” He holds up the Batman comic he’s reading.
Okay, I tell him, but not tonight. Tonight I’m the Lukos. I’m half werewolf, half vampire. And I’ve had my broccoli and cabbage and beetroot and I’m dying for some steak.
EIGHT
The smell of fear is everywhere tonight. Like a thick, wet mist. Like the stench of a wet dog. The red-brown-black smell of terror hangs in the air.
God, I’m such a hack.
I’m on my perch, high above the ground, watching Clarabell, my steak, huffing and puffing and panting as she runs round and round. Wasting so much time and energy and getting nowhere.
My eyes are so red and my teeth are so sharp. My entire body is covered in hard, black hair.
This is so much better than real life.
I’m sick of this ‘be yourself’ crap I hear all the time. As if being me was so fucking fantastic they’re selling raffle tickets for the privilege. I’m a twenty-five year old loser with no friends who works as a dishwasher for less than minimum wage. To every teacher I ever had, to my parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts I’m a failure and a letdown. But I guess everyone’s got a sad story, so just deal with it.
Before I met Clarabell I just used to pretend. I’d get into character and walk around and pretend I was a scientist sent form the future studying life in the early twenty first century. Pretend I was the reincarnation of a legendary Norse warrior. Pretend I was someone.
Clarabell was the trigger. The girl with a name someone would give to a cow. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
She was the one who took my fantasies up a notch.
My steak. My trigger. My love runs around the park for the fourth time and I’m out of the tree and flying through the air.
NINE
“Are your nuts okay?” asks Dexter.
I rub my balls and say, “I think it’s the first time she’s touched me.”
Last night, when I landed growling like a dog in front of Clarabell, she didn’t call me an idiot or a loser or any of those things. She silently but forcefully placed her foot between my legs.
“Oh well,” smiles Dex, “you always hurt the ones you love.”
There’s this girl I work with, one of the waitresses, who’s usually so happy and bubbly and happy all the time. Like if you asked her what time it was she’d always say, “It’s time to give your heart to Jesus!” This girl, she’s a veritable fountain of what I call ‘keyring philosophy’. She’s always full of gems like, “You only have one chance to make a first impression” or, “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
My motto is: If at first you don’t succeed, lower your standards.
My motto is: If you do your best, people will expect it from you all the time.
My motto is: Every silver lining has a cloud.
Anyway, this girl was always telling me about her perfect most perfectest perfect boyfriend who was just so perfect he was perfect. Until she found out that her perfect perfection was perfectly fucking her bestest of best best friends.
My motto is: Always expect the worst and you’ll never be disappointed.
So I thought, if I’m going to save the world I’d better start small. First work out those important, abstract ideals. Tonight I’m starting with Justice.
This girl has shown me so many pictures of this perfect guy I think I’m assaulted by his face more times a day than the Coke logo. The Nike swish. The big yellow M.
I’ve seen him around at this club in town. I always wondered what he would say if he knew that his girlfriend worked with an alien/human hybrid sent to pave the way for the Earth’s destruction.
Anyway, this girl has told me so much about this guy. Every detail of his life. So I go to this club he hangs out at and tell him I’m Mr Whoever’s son. I’m his boss’s son and I’ve seen him around the office and I’m on a drinking binge tonight and he’s just joined the party.
Dexter’s standing next to me. Smiling like he’s hanging out with this guy’s boss’s rich son and the drinks are flowing freely.
I don’t earn much so I’m not gonna spend a fortune getting Mr Perfect drunk. Instead a slip a Rohypnol, a date rape drug, into the first beer I buy this guy.
A couple of beers later he’s stumbling around and I tell him he’s in no state to drive home but not to worry, his new best buddy, his boss’s son, is going to make sure he gets home safe and sound.
We’re at my place and while I work Mr Perfect’s pants and underpants down to his knees Dexter is unscrewing the light bulb we’ve left burning the whole evening.
Dexter drops the bulb onto the bed and sticks his burnt fingers in his mouth. I get a dishtowel from the kitchen so I can pick the bulb up.
The girl I work with told me in tears that when her perfect boyfriend broke up with her and she asked him why he told her it was because she wouldn’t sleep with him. She’s still a virgin and was saving herself until marriage.
My motto is: Everybody’s got a sad story.
My motto is: All love is conditional.
Even your parent’s.
Even God’s.
Dexter is looking away holding Mr Perfect’s butt-cheeks open. I hold the hot bulb with the dishtowel and carefully squeeze it tight in his hole. He moans a bit but is so wasted and knocked out that he can’t struggle.
“It’s okay,” I whisper in his ear, “this will all be over in no time.”
Not tomorrow. Not the next day. But maybe three or four days later the memory of those words will drift back into the conscious part of his mind.
The screw-end of the bulb, pardon the pun, burns his hole red and sore. When I step back I think it looks a bit like a solar eclipse. A black spot with red fire around the edges. I pull his pants up and Dexter and I drag him back downstairs and out to the car.
We drive into a part of town with four or five gay clubs next to and across from each other. It’s about three thirty on a Wednesday morning and the street is deserted.
I pull the perfect little faggot bitch out of the backseat and yank his pants down. Tomorrow morning he’s gonna wake up not knowing how he got here around all these gay clubs with his pants around his ankles and his hole on fire like he’s been pounded from behind by six hundred and sixty six Godzilla-big penises and his whole world will be a different, scary, shameful place.
Poor baby.
My motto is: If sex is a pain in the arse you’re doing it wrong.
TEN
Dexter sits in the middle of the living room in the lotus position facing a small statue of the Buddha. Next to the fat, happy, enlightened little guy burns tangerine scented incense. Dexter’s back and shoulders are straight, his head is tilted slightly forward, and he’s counting his breaths in his head.
Breathe in – one.
Breathe out – two.
In – three.
Out – four.
Dexter says last night built up a lot of good karma for us.
He says after our little mission as champions of justice we’re closer to coming back as more enlightened beings.
I’m sitting on the couch quietly reading a comic book.
Green Lantern is a guy who has this power-ring that is the most powerful weapon in the universe. He can create anything he wants and all it takes is willpower. Me, I can’t even quit smoking.
According to Buddha humans are sentient beings. Unlike animals, apparently, we humans have the ability to reach satori, enlightenment, ultimate happiness.
The person who wants nothing has everything.
I find that a bit hard to swallow. I think we’ve got it all wrong. We’re the least evolved species. Think about it, a camel doesn’t want a bigger house or a faster car or a better job. A gorilla doesn’t hoard
