In Extremis Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  YOU BLUNDERING IDIOT YOU FUCKING FAILED TO KILL ME AGAIN

  CRAM

  JUST LIKE SUZIE

  JUST A SUGGESTION

  THE EXQUISITELY BLEEDING - HEADS OF DOKTUR PALMER VREEDEEZ

  CUL-DE-SAC

  GOTTERDAMMERGUN

  “I WANT TO GET MARRIED,” - SAYS THE WORLD’S SMALLEST MAN

  FACES IN WALLS

  LEARN AT HOME! - YOUR CAREER IN EVIL

  ANSWERING MACHINE

  PAPER ANGELS ON FIRE

  CALL GIRL, ECHOED

  YOU HEAR WHAT BUDDY AND RAY DID?

  SMARTBOMBER

  RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU’RE DEAD

  THE GUN AS AN AID TO POETRY

  ANIMUS RIGHTS

  SKEETER JUNKIE

  TIGHTER

  TEN THINGS TO BE GRATEFUL FOR

  SCREW

  ORIGINAL PUBLICATION DATA

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR JOHN SHIRLEY

  “Shirley writes at the neon-lit frontier of sensory experience.”

  —Publisher’s Weekly

  “Snapping, snarling, vigorously wrought drama . . . Shirley writes splendid stuff.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “John Shirley has a reporter’s eye and a demon’s attitude. His stories will have you laughing one minute and curling into a sweaty fetal knot the next. If Jon Stewart was possessed by the devil these tales are what he’d sound like.”

  —Richard Kadrey

  “John Shirley serves up the bloody heart of a sick and rotting society with the aplomb of an Aztec surgeon on dexadrine . . .”

  —Booklist

  “. . . all his stories . . . give off the chill of top-grade horror. It’s a moral chill, because Shirley’s great subject is the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering . . . And while the matter of his stories is often shocking, his manner is calm, restrained. The prose is attitude-free and precise, its characteristic sound a minor chord of sorrow and banked anger. He writes about sensation un-sensationally, with a particular tenderness toward those who manage, against the odds and by whatever means, to feel something . . .”

  —New York Times Review of Books

  “. . . one of the darkest, edgiest, boldest writers around . . . [Shirley writes with] adrenalized, jivey, yet extremely artful prose that fairly skids across the page, dragging the reader along with it into shadowed corners of terror and desire. Yet while it’s thrilling, there’s psychological depth in it, too, as Shirley bores into the brains of his characters, revealing the motivations of those who walk on the wild side.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  For Harlan Ellison

  Special thanks to Paula Guran,

  who did a lot of work on this.

  And thanks to Victoria Blake for her

  visionary publishing and editorial help.

  Also: a special thanks to Robert Curry

  Additional thanks to Micky Shirley.

  AN INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

  in ex·tre·mis (ĭn ěk-strē’mĭs) adv.

  1. At the point of death.

  2. In grave or extreme circumstances.

  [Latin in extrēmīsin, in + ēxtremīs, ablative pl. of ēxtremus, extreme.]

  —The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition.

  Extremes are revealing. People under high duress show their dark sides and their heroism, their fears and their deepest secrets. Immediacy, urgency, rage, fear, degradation, wild disorientation, despair, perverse heights of joy—these are like lenses lined up in a microscope exposing the inner reality of the human condition.

  The subtitle of this book is a risk—it could sound like pop debris. To some it might evoke “extreme sports” or “extreme video.” There’s a bowling alley near my home that has an “extreme bowling” night. Still, “the most extreme stories of” seemed the best way to say it. Why should we allow the word extreme to be hijacked by low commerce?

  Much “extreme” writing is insignificant—it’s the worst of pulp or it’s mere porn, or self- indulgence—as in brutality for the sake of it. But other sorts of extreme writing have historically been quite significant. There were the novels by de Sade—I’m not a fan, but they were his honest attempt at art. There was “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Poe, its narrator in an extreme psychological state. Remember also the very dark late-career work of Mark Twain. There were heart-piercing stories by Ambrose Bierce; there were prose poems by Baudelaire eloquently extolling excess; there was Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden; there was Celine; there was Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” (its plays were not about sadism, but about confrontation with reality). We might think of the novels of Hubert Selby; or The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson—or The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinki. There were extreme works by Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs and Dennis Cooper, of course. There was J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition; there were several particularly edgy works by Harlan Ellison (e.g., “A Boy and His Dog”); there were certain works by Samuel Delany. And one could compare it to extreme forms of music, like Penderecki, and the more powerful punk rock.

  Some of the stories in this volume are fleurs du mal sprouting in the outer fringes of the American demimonde: they dramatize the extreme effects the worst drugs can have on people, the sick desperation that underlies prostitution, the instinctual power of violence; they explore sexual madness. Some characters and situations in this collection are based on my own lapses into that society, years ago. I had a window on some very extreme scenes. I met murderers, crack whores, and a good many “straight” men and women dragged down by that world. I’ve left those scenes behind—but much of what I saw stays with me.

  I don’t see those people as monsters—though they can be monstrous—I see them as people caught up by powerful impulses they don’t understand. They are, in fact, human beings blindly trying to fumble their way out of their own special mazes.

  A kind of bizarre, damaged sexual imagery crops up in this collection, with some regularity, though not in every story. Sexual extremes are instructive; they delve into the unconscious. Those passages are certainly not intended to be sexually arousing. If they are, consult your physician. (Of course, if it happens you’re an eighteen-year-old boy, almost anything sexual is sexually arousing).

  Other stories, here, are about social extremes. Some explore the surreal. Some are more intense than others, but they all explore some form of extremity. Some of them—like the first story in the book, or “Just Like Suzie”—evoke dark comedy, or absurdity, even “absurdism.” They mingle horror and humor, liquefy them, stir them into one cocktail. Others are more frankly nightmarish.

  In search of extreme effects, I broke some standard writing rules in a few of these tales—for example, occasional lines written IN ALL CAPS, in certain of the more absurdist works. I experimented. But I was in control of each story in this book.

  I should mention that I’ve re-edited some of the older stories, and even updated them a little. I’ve arranged the stories in the collection to contrast with one another in tone, where possible; there is a certain rhythm in the levels of intensity as the book goes on.

  Also, In Extremis is framed by shattered worlds: the first and last stories involve apocalypse. We start with the ultimate extreme and we end on it.

  Finally, as I’ve written a good many extreme stories, this collection could have been 150,000 words instead of 100,000. But that would have made it unwieldy. Stories like “Jody and Annie on TV,” “Six Kinds of Darkness,” “Barbara” and “Equilibrium,” to name a few, are conspicuously absent. But I had to ma
ke choices, and I was biased toward including more recent works. I wrote “The Gun as an Aid to Poetry” specifically for In Extremis: The Most Extreme Stories of John Shirley.

  John Shirley

  September 2010

  YOU BLUNDERING IDIOT YOU FUCKING FAILED TO KILL ME AGAIN

  The Macrobeing had heard about the planet—it had heard terrible, appalling stories of conditions there. Out of curiosity and some awesome, unimaginable, cosmic variation of pity, the Macrobeing descended through many levels, through layers of laws, through dimension after dimension, down to a mere three dimensions, to see this world for itself. To see if the story was true . . .

  Other members of the Macrobeings macroscopic race speculated that there must be some good and sufficient reason this planet was so polluted, so verminous, so pestilential, so dominated by brutality and predation—but the Macrobeing wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t so sure at all that this horror, the planet Earth, should be allowed to continue. The problem wasn’t merely the dominant race: the lower animals, too, lived mostly by preying on one another—actually eating one another!—or by trying to avoid being eaten.

  It seemed cruel to allow it to go on.

  Samuel Masterson Helleck figured that Stubs Grunauer was the man for the job. Grunauer was bulky and strong and indifferent to the feelings of others out of an innate, happy-go-lucky stupidity, like a rhino stepping heedlessly on a bird, and he’d do anything for money that didn’t require real sweat-breaking work, or thinking, and he never thought about consequences so he wouldn’t worry about legality. Grunauer had been quite surprised the time he was arrested for breaking into a supermarket at night and cooking a steak on the concrete floor in the back room—he’d piled up barbecue charcoal. When the cops came in, alerted by several alarms, Grunauer was just sitting there drinking cheap vodka from a bottle—though he could just as easily have taken the good stuff off the shelves—and watching his steak sizzle directly on the coals . . .

  “What? I was fucking hungry, dude!” he told them.

  So Helleck figured that two hundred dollars would be enough to induce Grunauer to kill him—to effectuate his suicide—even though Grunauer was only three days out of jail.

  A big man with a slack mouth and perpetual halitosis, his dishwaterhair cut in the shape of a bowl around his pimply forehead, Grunauer was wearing a black and silver Oakland Raiders shirt, a size too small for him, so that his gut slopped out under it, that drizzly July day in Fremont, California.

  “Supposed to be sun out, in July,” Grunauer observed as Helleck came into the weedy, junked-up backyard of Grunauer’s white crackerbox house. Actually it was the house of Grunauer’s long-suffering mother.

  Grunauer was standing there in the drizzle, in his sagging jeans and rotting tennis shoes, gaping up at the sky, a forty of Olde English in his right hand.

  “You keep standing like that, Grunauer,” Helleck said, “eventually you’re going to drown.”

  Grunauer blinked away rain, drank some beer, and looked at Helleck. He didn’t seem surprised to see Helleck here, in his backyard, though they hadn’t seen each other for seventeen years. Helleck’s straw-like hair had receded to just above his ears, marking the passage of years, but Grunauer behaved as if they’d just seen each other at high school that day. “I mean, this fucking rain, man,” Grunauer said. “You bring any beer, Helleck? I’m about out.”

  Grunauer had been a linebacker on the school team, Helleck had played tight end. Helleck had left the team because the coach wouldn’t consider him when quarterback opened up—typical, in Helleck’s view, of the unfair hands dealt to him by life. The coach was prejudiced against him because of his obvious artistic gifts—jocks always resented a genius—and then girls turned from him because, in all probability, they were intimidated by his spontaneous brilliance. Bosses fired him because his wit was too acerbic, his insight into their foibles too shatteringly incisive.

  Helleck could take no more of the world’s persecution. He would punish all humanity by withdrawing from it, and afterwards, after his death, his poetry, his lyrics, the acoustic songs he’d put up online, would shine out, would take the world by storm, and he would be appreciated like Van Gogh, like Poe, like Fred Smargenbarger. Well, not many knew about Fred Smargenbarger, but Helleck would never forget his immortal lines:

  I turn to survey the fruit of my squatting—

  How my crap shines in the moonlight!

  Smargenbarger was a fellow unsung genius, in Helleck’s view.

  Helleck looked around the tatty backyard with distaste; saw a dead cat half hidden by a tarp in one corner; also a rusting oil barrel, an old soft-plastic kiddy pool, a rusting tire rim, a rusting wheel barrow, several overgrown piles of bricks.

  “Your bricks are missing their brac,” said Helleck.

  Grunauer just stared at him. What had he expected? Wit was lost on the witless. But that made Grunauer perfect for the job: too stupid to think he might get arrested later if the cops came on him doing the deed.

  “Grunauer,” Helleck said. “I want to hire you for two hundred dollars.”

  “To do what?”

  “To kill me. And I’ll pay you for it.”

  “Uhhhh . . . ’kay,” Grunauer said. “My ma’s been getting on me, I don’t earn no money. I remember when I forgot to go to school that year, she said, ‘You ain’t gonna earn no money if you don’t go to school.’ Only, I never figured out where they paid you at school—”

  “Grunauer? Shut up. If you want the two hundred dollars, shut up. Now—here’s one hundred dollars of the money.”

  He handed Grunauer five twenties, half of what remained of his final unemployment check. “Here’s the first half. You get the second hundred after . . .”

  Grunauer blinked at him. “You give it to me after I kill you?”

  “What? No, no, no . . . after I’m dead, look in my wallet, there’s an address where the rest is, under my bed.”

  “Wait—who’d you say you wanted me to kill?”

  “Me.”

  “You? No, but . . . who?”

  “Me, you idiot, me! It’s a suicide! I want to be dead! The world doesn’t fucking deserve me! And I don’t think I could bring myself to jump off a building or something—I’d lose my nerve. Someone’s got to do it to me.”

  Grunauer nodded seven or eight times. Then he nodded three times more. Then twice more. “’Kay. You bring, um, a gun?”

  “No. I looked into that, and it’s really hard to buy a gun legally, takes weeks. I’ve got to get this done while I’m psyched to do it. And I already sent the letters to the papers and editors and everyone with samples of my poetry and tapes of my songs and stuff. So it’s gotta be done. I tried to buy a gun on the street but I couldn’t find anybody I trusted not to pretend they were gonna sell me a gun and just take the money and not come across with the gun—since, after all, they’d have a gun and I wouldn’t. So we’re gonna do it some other way.”

  “How you want me to kill you?”

  “Well . . . is that an old kiddy pool, there? One of those little inflatable swimming pools?”

  “Yuh. My mum found it on some free stuff heap somewheres.” Grunauer took another long pull of his beer.

  “It’s already half full of water—just fill it with the hose there and hold my head down in it.”

  “Uh-kay . . . No.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t mind doin’ the job of killing you but fillin’ it up is work, dude.”

  “I . . . fuck it, I’ll do it.” Helleck found a hose, turned the water on, filled the blue and yellow plastic kiddy pool. There were pictures of SpongeBob mixed with some kind of dancing grinning starfish around the side. SpongeBob and that starfish would witness his death and rejoice with him. There was a poem in that, somewhere. But the time for all that was past—except for the final poetic statement; his death.

  Helleck tossed the hose aside, knelt, and waved Grunauer over. “Okay, come on, hold my head down in here till I dro
wn.”

  “Uh-kay, yuh sure. The money’s in your wallet?”

  “No, the rest of it’s at my house, the address is in my wallet. Come on, let’s get it done!”

  Grunauer finished the Olde English, tossed the bottle aside with a clunk, and sat on Helleck so that his face was smashed down into the water.

  Helleck immediately tried to cry out in protest—somehow being crushed by Grunauer’s ass lacked dignity as a way to die—but water filled his mouth and nose and rushed down into his lungs and SpongeBob seemed to dance in front of him, wavering through the lens of the water as he drowned, and he reflected that, after all, drowning is drowning. Fuck, but this really hurt, it hurt in his lungs, he hoped it would be over soon. It really, really hurt. It was too much, it hurt too much, and he started flailing around to break free and—

  That moron Grunauer stood up.

  Helleck sat up, spewing water, coughing, and heard a woman talking, the bent little white-haired toothless woman in the stained shift who’d let him into the backyard, Grunauer’s mother. “I don’t care what he is paying you, you sure as hell can’t do that here,” she was saying. “Now Stubs git out of here with that, I don’t want to know about it! And leave the money here for me to take care of!”

  “Uh-kay Ma.”

  “Grunauer,” Helleck managed to say, between gasps, “you idiot! You could have ignored her and finished the job!”

  “Naw, she hides the TV remote if I don’t do what she says.”

  “Oh for Christ’s—alright, come on, let’s go somewhere else.”

  Helleck’s lungs still burned as they walked out through the gate, past the yammering old lady, neither one of them taking in what she was saying, then down the street two blocks to the railroad tracks that ran through a district of mostly abandoned warehouses. They crossed the gravel strip to the tracks and then Grunauer got an inspired look on his face and pointed. “Huh look, there’s a big piece-a metal like a crowbar kinda thing—them railroad guys musta lost it there. I could use that to bash you in! Put your head on the railroad tracks!”