A CHRISTMAS TURKEY

Cyber Bullying. It's not much fun to be on the other end. Let me state at this point, for Bret Easton Ellis, for Marilyn Manson, for Serj Tankian and most especially for the militant Neo-Nazi boy collective the Jankonians. I never wanted to play Wembley. I am an avant-garde novelist who inadvertently got myself trapped into the hostile world of the internet, and became a mad cause for all sorts of Occult Satanists, Romany Voodoo Gypsies, Operatic Surfer Boys, grungy, optomistic Nu-metallers, weird, post-structuralist novelists, breakthrough artists, Ricky Gervais, the Arctic Monkeys, Emile Sande, South Park, Absolute Radio, the esteemed nihilistic philosopher John Gray wrote two books. Literary crone A.N Wilson thought I was the next Hitler. Tarantino had an interpretation of my debut novel and won an Oscar for his troubles. Mel Gibson made a prison film. Avril Lavigne got a tattoo. Marilyn Manson had a panic attack and every other Tom, Dick and Harry donned sunglasses, drove fast, smoked cigarettes, got haunted, got hip. You've never heard of me. That's understandable. You have to have reached a certain level in the industry to be aware of me, although nowadays my tattered public persona is starting to creep out a little... I'm a one trick pony, I'm a cling on costume, I'm a magical toilet slut. Let me explain... In 2009 I self published my debut novel "Smoking Is Cool", the story of a self-loathing, self-adoring, conflicted young man who wakes from a suicide attempt, puts on a pair of sunglasses and checks himself into a local mental institution, after which he escapes by stealing his parents' credit card, fucks some hookers,smokes some crack, drops some pills, snorts some coke, takes some ketamine, drinks some whisky, beats the shit out of some vagrants, buys a ring and travels to Edinburgh to marry his ex-girlfriend who he hasn't seen in ten years. He gets sectioned AGAIN, this time in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital and wages war on the unit, eventually (after falling in love with a girl called Ariadne who has the same name as the prostitute he bangs down in London and having a tooth extracted on an acid comedown) manipulating a violent offender to murder a staff nurse so he can escape and propose to her. He is turned over to the police, and sings Bohemian Rhapsody as he led to the waiting police van, consoling himself that at least in prison he'll be able to get some crack. Doesn't that sound like a hell of a good movie? Anyway, that's conjecture since Serj Tankian, System of a Down frontman successfully lobbied to have the book banned from public sale. But how did he get a copy and how come you've never heard of it? In 2010 I queued for 4 hours to meet internationally notorious novelist Bret Easton Ellis at Leadenhall Market in London as part of his "Imperial Bedrooms" tour. I was first in line. I got there four hours early. I was living in Supported Accomodation in Penge in a unit for ex-offenders and abuse victims on £80 a week. My middle class friends had long since given me up as a lost cause so I sat, sneaking in cans of Red Stripe and playing Ice T and Biggie whilst staring out sideways towards the street since my window faced out onto a wall. It was a miserable time in my life. But, onwards and upwards, as an avant-garde novelist, pain is gold dust so I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, and after two years had concoted a demonic novel called "Smoking Is Cool", the ultimate anti-psychiatry poem, filled to the brim with the dark and the crazed and the bitter and the wrong and the sad and the tragic and the laughter in the face of all out blitzkrieg. Bret turned up fashionably late, tall, slightly geeky, grinning bashfully with state of the art Hollywood sunglasses on. I had been chatting to the crowd for hours, and the queue stretched far into the horizon. We had discussed "American Psycho", and the two bankers next to me who'd come for autographs wondered what kind of masturbatory tricks Bret had gotten up to in concocting this horrific satire, that features a woman being eaten alive through her vagina by a hungry rat and a homeless man having his eyeball squished out with a flick knife and a five year old boy being stabbed for no reason whilst the killer tells the child's mother he's a doctor. Bret is gay, but I thought he was bisexual, which is why I claimed to be the English Bret Easton Ellis in the text of "Smoking Is Cool", since I am for all intents and purposes, openly bisexual and never really thought that that was much of a problem as an avant-garde literary expressionist. Anyway. I had brought presents. I had a copy of Lucio Fulci's "New York Ripper" (THE SICKEST MOVIE EVER MADE!!!) and within the DVD box, a memory stick containing thousands of pages of text and the complete novel of "Smoking Is Cool". I told him I had presents. "Ooh," he grinned, "Gimme the presents!" So we bantered for 45 seconds, and within that time I'd told him Mark Brandon 'Chopper' Read was my joint favourite author, that I had a Facebook stalker from the website discussion forum House of Leaves, that if he'd reviewed Fight Club, he could definitely review me, and then with that I left him to fend for three hours from waiting fans with a copy of "New York Ripper" and "Smoking Is Cool" on the table in front of him. He left London for a tour of Europe and began emailing the novel around the industy. The email went viral. Everybody read it. NOBODY BOUGHT IT. Since Joe in the novel is solely obsessed with fame, nobody directly acknowledged me, (except for Mike Einziger in the sleeve notes to the Incubus album "If Not Now, When?", who later turned on me after my twitter feed took a turn for the psychopathic)and I was stuck in movie theatres and book shops and YouTube seeing delusions become reality as too many coincidences to the novel began taking shape in the artistic endeavours of my heroes. I could spend the next four hours writing more of this, but I recently destroyed my computer in a fit of paranoid pique after insults about me (THE MAGICAL TOILET IS A SLUT!) trended number one on Twitter and I felt like MI5 had bugged my phone and I have only 5 minutes left in the library computer. So I will say that the story will continue here, and only here, soon, sometime, somehow. Season's Greetings, and be warned, since I am writing a new book and this time I intend on getting it out there to the masses, and I have vengeance on my mind... A.W.M 18/12/2013