- The Supernaturals
Just listened to the second half of the Marilyn Manson/Bret Easton Ellis podcast. There's a reason, apparently, why all major Hollywood blockbusters take place in China now.
"Hollywood is over," Ellis sighed as Manson sipped Absinthe and they discussed what increased transparency with social media and the endless stream of content in today's creative industries meant for the artist. What does it mean? It's harder to make an impact, obviously, and it's harder to draw a crowd.
I'm trying to write a new novel. When I was writing my previous (now withdrawn) two books I remember that I was a lot less distracted than I am today. I have Netflix now. I wrote "Smoking Is Cool" on a laptop without internet access over a period of seven years in and out of psychiatric units. I'm trying to write the new one with access to whatever I want to watch, hear or play. And my drive is going. I don't have the same urge to dissect the post-digital world as I used to. There seems little point. Firstly, the audience I thought I wanted has gone. People who I'd like to read the book, don't read. Or maybe I've spent too long with the mentally ill. One of the recurring figures in my last blog as well as in my novels was a mentally ill street thug called Raf. Raf is real. He is one of the most mind-numbingly exasperating people I've ever met, but because he just turned up whenever he felt like it, I just went along, preoccupied in my mind with dreams of writing a hit, like all writers do, getting out, going somewhere. I started to see him as research because it was easier. Raf has no formal education, no job, no real friends, no girlfriend, and watches "The Passion of the Christ" and "The Exorcist" as a double bill on a weekly basis. He claims people are after him, but since he starts fights on a regular basis with anybody who questions his fragile self-esteem and latent self-loathing it's hard to tell. Maybe they are, and maybe they're not. His maths skills are so poor that he often starts on coffee shop workers for short-changing him, despite that being an impossibility given the nature of their computerised systems. On New Year's Eve he wanted to go out. So I went round to his, whereby he decided not to, instead watching "Orange Is The New Black" and wondering why Piper (the central character) would defend herself from a knife attack in the final season.
"I mean, you'd fall to pieces if somebody pulled a blade on you bruv," he said, mistaking me for her. "It's not in-keeping with the character," he said. "I mean cos I really like her! She wouldn't do that. I don't think it's realistic. I really like her. She wouldn't become a maniac. I don't believe it."
That night he woke up screaming abuse at me to call an ambulance. "Call me an ambulance you fuck, you fucking cunt, call me an ambulance I'm having a heart attack!"
I called him an ambulance and they turned up, and his lecherous, dominant side kicked in as they took him downstairs: "And you're waiting here," he said. Turns out he was fine and it's just another key example of his nervous hypochondria. He sees a "sex-doctor" on a regular basis and expects me to understand what he's talking about based on a one line sentence, and if I don't understand straight off, "Well fuck you and your education then you little prick, work it out, work it out! Yeah grammar school education bollocks. You ain't so smart."
Most of the time he goes on about how selfish I am.
"You think Bret Easton Ellis is gonna read your piece of shit book? I wrote a better book, I wrote a better book than you, and I burnt mine but your book, I'm gonna tell you something, your book was a piece of shit and you think you're some big man? Don't come it bruv, don't come it you little nerd prick motherfucker, don't come it..."
It's the same rage that peaks at the corners of any failure. His one attempt at a job was as a DJ, and he played about four gigs before (I'm assuming) his self-loathing and aggression and immaturity and unworldliness made him impossible to work with. In fact, most of my life's problems over the past twelve years has not come from having a mental illness myself, it's been from being forced into company that would not look out of place in a Jeremy Kyle special.
My new novel takes place at a prestigious performing arts school, and part of my experiences with Raf have bled into the central character Romeo, who, after failing to become a successful teen star makes a snuff film in order to force his mark onto the industry. He pays for Facebook advertising, and sitting in remand waiting for the case to unravel, writes down his life story. It's a little hokey maybe, but right now it's all I have. My problem with the novel lies in two key points:
1.) When do I set it? From about 2009-2014 history has seemingly wiped itself out and an endless stream of content has replaced it. All I need to know is how old he was when Facebook was invented, and I'll be able to have a shot at creating some kind of timeline.
2.) How on Earth do I include every single Social Media outlet around when I'm barely aware of most of them? Research. Get Instagram, I suppose. Get Snapchat. Get involved.
-----
There’s
a story Florence told me when I was a kid, and this was a long time ago, this
was before Facebook so you can only imagine.
“A
couple takes a trip into a wood in their car to have sex,” she whispered. It
was at a sleepover, boys were invited. Todd Openshaw ended up losing his
virginity with Charlotte Currell in the upstairs bathroom. She bled.“And the man says there’s been sightings of an escaped mental patient in the woods so they have to stay quiet, or else. And the girl gets a little scared, and they drive into the woods and there’s a loud bang and the car stops.” She paused (I remember this vividly) for effect.
“Flat tire.”
It was just the two of us down the end of the garden, and I was waiting for her to finish so I could try and kiss her, fondle her, grab her, to do something. Florence was dolled up like Kim Kardashian (she was mixed race, I believe) wearing a training bra and she’d started shaving her legs. We were thirteen.
“Wait here, the man said to the girl, I’m going for help.”
I didn’t smoke yet. It’s funny, I took to smoking quickly. Dad never taught me how to fight so I started smoking. Even though I hit puberty quickly, I grew out rather than up. I went from nine stone to twelve by the age of fourteen despite being five feet five. I was the fat boy. When I decided to write this book, after everything that happened, I decided I would try and write my side of events, something to explain why things happened like they did and to try and explain why things got so out of hand. After reading Florence’s book I knew things had to be rectified. And I don’t care what the New York Times says. She stole most of it from online blogs because it’s what she used to do in class. She would cut and paste psychology articles and change key words around, change the structure of the sentences. St. Giften’s had a lot of student teachers after the walkout over pensions, so they were too dumb to notice.
“The girl tried to get him to stay in the car with her, but he was trying to look cool, so he went for help. And she sat there. It was dark outside. And she waited. And waited. Half an hour passed. She put on the radio. You know that song? The song what’s it called again?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Yeah, that one. Anyway, that was playing. And when the drums kicked in she heard a thump. A loud one. And she turned down the music. And she could hear a thump, thump on top of the car. And she was terrified. Thump. Thump. Thump. She was petrified. She sat there and she didn’t know what to do, and this was before mobile phones had been invented, so I think maybe that song wasn’t playing, after all, this was back in the eighties, and it really happened, I saw a documentary about it, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“And then suddenly there were lights from behind her, car lights, and a police siren, and still the thump, thump, thump on the top of her car, and she could hear people approaching, and the car door opened and there was a policeman. Thump. Thump. Thump. And he said to her, I think you need to come with me.”
Florence wrote a lot of things in her book that were simply not true.
I know she was wounded in the incident. I know she got hurt. I know she’ll never be the same, walk the same, act the same, talk the same, I know she’s scarred. But is that any reason to lie?
“The policeman took her by the arm and dragged her out of the car and he said, whatever you do, don’t look back. And she can still hear the thump, thump, thump and she turned round and screamed.”
Florence looked tumescent.
“There was the escaped mental patient, and he was banging her boyfriend’s head on the car, thump. Thump. Thump…” Florence giggled. “She ended up in therapy for the rest of her life.”
“What happened to the boyfriend?” I asked.
“Dead. From massive head trauma.”
“And the escaped mental patient?”
“After they were sure the boyfriend was dead they took him back to his hospital and that’s where he is today, sitting in the corner of his cell, banging his head against the padded wall. Thump. Thump. Thump.”
“Huh,” I said.
“What do you think?” Florence asked.
“Why didn’t the police stop him? You know, drag him off or something?”
“Oh,” she said, “Don’t you know? It’s illegal to attack mental patients. They’re protected by law. It’s why they don’t go to prison for their crimes.”
“Huh.”
Florence lent forward. “Thump, thump, thump,” she said. I moved to kiss her and she recoiled and started laughing. “Oh God, Romeo,” she laughed, “I could never have sex with you, I’d have to be artificially inseminated. Come on,” she said, taking my hand, “let’s go back to the house.”
Stealthy
ate a slug. I was toying around with some of the editing features on my Samsung
Galaxy, talking about Deodato and how the Italians pioneered the use of real
animal sacrifice in zombie and cannibal movies of the late seventies and
eighties. We were in the park with a weak rock of solid.
“You
used to be able to stream the uncut version of Cannibal Holocaust,” I said, taking a hit. “That’s before the
studios put pressure on the pirates and now we have to pay for the same old
shit we used to get for free. They slice open a massive sea turtle and cut off
its head and wave it at the camera.”“I’d eat a sea turtle,” Stealthy said. I pushed record.
“That was good. Say that again.”
“I’d eat a sea turtle. In fact I’d probably eat a small child. If it annoyed me.”
“Raw? Or would you cook it?”
“Garlic and butter with shallots and tinned tomatoes with a dash of sugar. Tinned tomatoes and sugar is my secret shit, honey, the consistency is sweeter than fresh. And the meat should be rare, there should be some blood off the bone.”
The battery was getting low. My dumbass sister had borrowed the charger before her audition. The flash would go soon. Stealthy fell backwards onto the wet grass and coughed. Then, as I circled him, he picked up a fat, juicy slug and put it in his mouth and ate it.
“Agh agh agh smagh chagah,” he said, just before he threw up. There was plenty of real vomiting in Cannibal Holocaust. Crew members got scared they were making a big budget snuff movie. It used to be the type of illegal video nasty they found in the dank pits of serial killers along with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS before Grindhouse Chic and the Tarantino/Rodriguez revivals made a remake of I Spit On Your Grave commercially viable and people started laughing through The Exorcist instead of having spontaneous abortions and endless waking nightmares.
Stealthy’s teeth were sticking together from the glue inside the slug and black slime was creeping from the corners of his mouth.
The flash died.
“The flash is dead, the battery’s gone. Fucking bitch,” I said, and put the phone in my pocket. I got some decent enough footage for one night. Stealthy was gagging, tears welling in his eyes.
“Agah.. smagh agah fugh…” he moaned.
I handed him the bottle of cider. He looked at it, trying to open his mouth to spit where the slug had glued his teeth together.
“I’ll buy you a toothbrush at the garage,” I said.
“I’ve gogh a headaghe,” he said. I looked down at the remains of the slug in the slick of vomit. If I had upgraded to the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom I would have had a longer battery life and Optical Image Stabilisation with a 10x zoom lens which would have picked up the black bits in the yellow and orange puddle. I could have cut it to a moving tracking jump cut of us on the train with the houses going past and back to the puddle and back and forth and back and forth creating a dizzying montage fully expressing the angst of the post-digital teen experience.
That was the first four pages. I include it in this blog only because it seems in-keeping with the state of the culture right now. And because it will cement me into writing this book, I include it because now I'll have to finish it.
A.W.M 13/01/2014
