f.u.c.kness.

A Novel.

Andersen Prunty.

Introduction:.

f.u.c.kness and The Bad Time.

My name is Wallace Black. Before I tell you anything about myself I should tell you about the Bad Time. And before I tell you about the Bad Time, I should tell you about my philosophy. Everyone, whether he knows it or not, lives his life by some type of philosophy. I'm not talking about the type of philosophy found in books, the s.h.i.t n.o.body really understands. I'm talking about some innate code individuals are born with. The type of philosophy usually not thought about too much and often summed up in a few words. The kind of s.h.i.t people wear on t-shirts and stick to their b.u.mpers. And we see the proclamation of that philosophy on their t-shirt or b.u.mper sticker and it, in turn, defines them.

There was this woman who lived down the street. She had a b.u.mper sticker that read, "Life's a b.i.t.c.h." I knew very little about this woman, but whenever I saw her emerge from her car-her dumpy frame crammed into a pair of stonewashed jeans, a pile of hair virtually sc.r.a.ping the sky-I knew that woman had it rough. Her life was, indeed, a b.i.t.c.h. As I watched her walk in that slouchingly comic way, knees seemingly before body, dragging heavy-a.s.sed into her house, I wondered how she could drive or walk at all. Life had undoubtedly beaten her down so much these tasks were something accomplished only through some m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic necessity. And where did she drive, anyway? To a place filled with lots of other miserable people living out their grim, brief philosophies, too?

I called my philosophy the philosophy of f.u.c.kness. I first developed this philosophy when I realized I was the type of person who would go to just about any lengths necessary in order to avoid trouble and misery. That is, I just wanted to live life the way I wanted to live it without any interruptions or having to answer to anyone.

I quickly realized this was impossible.

No matter how actively I avoided just about every situation, trouble seemed to find me. This trouble is what I called f.u.c.kness.

All the world's absurdity quickly fell under the definition of f.u.c.kness. Loosely, the dictionary defines "absurd" as something so clearly untrue or unreasonable as to be laughable or ridiculous. When I was about twelve, when I first started thinking about this philosophy of f.u.c.kness, everything seemed ridiculous to me, only I wasn't laughing.

And I didn't even know the Bad Time was coming.

A man puts on a shirt and tie five or more mornings out of the week and no one finds this absurd. It is not the man putting on the shirt and tie I would define as f.u.c.kness, it is the fact no one else finds it ridiculous. And this man goes to work where he labors for someone else forty hours or more and at the end of the week he is given a paycheck. Does this man realize he is a rat? Does this man realize everything about him is ridiculous? If he realizes this then the situation surrounding him is not f.u.c.kness. "Carry on," I would tell him. However, if he is unaware of the heightened sense of absurdity surrounding him and the majority of his life, he is enveloped by f.u.c.kness. His whole situation reeks of f.u.c.kness. He might not have seen the Bad Time, but he's got plenty of f.u.c.kness.

There are, of course, various degrees of f.u.c.kness.

My troubles, my heavy f.u.c.kness, the Bad Time, happened about ten years back when I was sixteen and in my third year of eighth grade. That's when I really started thinking about divine punishment, redemption, my place in the world, and all that other coming of age bulls.h.i.t.

I guess what it came down to was that I simply didn't fit in.

For starters, I was incredibly stupid. I mean, I didn't really consider myself stupid or anything. Actually, it was quite the opposite. I considered myself a genius. I considered myself to be one of the only alive and aware human beings on the planet, but I still knew I was somehow less than everybody else. It was seeing all those blobs so unaware their lives were nothing but big jokes that really bothered me. That they were so oblivious to the giant clouds of f.u.c.kness gathered around all their blobby heads and threatening to p.i.s.s down some acidic rain that could tear away the fabric of their realities at any moment.

I figured it was all a game when you got right down to it. The blobs picked their games and played them, depending on which games were the easiest.

Everybody else seemed to know how to play this game. It was like they had their games all chosen for them. Those f.u.c.ks seemed to have some cheat sheet built right into their brains that had all the rules and tips and clues to these games spelled out on them. They had control of the game. Maybe that was where my philosophy of f.u.c.kness came from. Maybe I never had control of the game. Like maybe I just wasn't made for it. If that was the case, if I were somehow chosen to do something other than play their ridiculous game, then their control of the game must have blossomed from their complete ignorance of it. Like they didn't even know somebody somewhere was laughing at them.

Regardless, whether I was born to play the game or not, I refused.

I knew I didn't have those rules built in. I didn't have any f.u.c.king cheat sheets and I figured, if I played one of their stupid little games, I'd be the one to end up dead last. There was one thing I was almost sure of-if I were meant to go out there in the world of f.u.c.kness, I would have had so much of it on me so quickly I would have crumbled under the pressure before I could wipe the mother's placenta from my eyes.

The only way to even half-cope with all the f.u.c.kness of the world was to say, "f.u.c.k it." If I had to sum up my philosophy of f.u.c.kness in a few words so I could cram it on a b.u.mper sticker or t-shirt, those were the words I would have chosen: "f.u.c.k it." So, for brevity's sake, that was pretty much my philosophy at the time. And it was a real beautiful philosophy, too. I liked that philosophy so much because it could have a couple of meanings. One, of course, was kind of s.e.xual. But it was sort of a mean kind of s.e.xual. Kind of like rape. This s.e.xual meaning implied some kind of force. "f.u.c.k it"-like I was forcefully attacking the world, raping the h.e.l.l out of it, actively eliminating the f.u.c.kness that filled it.

There was also something kind of pacifist about "f.u.c.k it." Like just trying to avoid the f.u.c.kness altogether. Like not even taking part in the world, just sitting back and letting it all flame by, watching all the blobs trying to win the game and knowing there weren't any winners.

"f.u.c.k it." Beautiful.

Of course, the f.u.c.kness always had a way of finding me. The harder I tried to avoid it, the harder it hit me.

Maybe from hearing that, you'll already understand I wasn't as bright as your average individual. I mean, most people wanted to say "f.u.c.k it," but they rarely did. Most people never truly f.u.c.ked anything.

Most people had something to lose.

So maybe I wasn't a genius. But at least I was aware of the game and it bothered the h.e.l.l out of me. Anybody who knew how to play the game without letting it bother them was a blob. A stinking, quivering blob.

So this isn't the story of a genius. It isn't even the story of a particularly intelligent person. But it is my story. My story of f.u.c.kness. Of how I let the f.u.c.kness bother me and how it found me, again and again.

Oh, and it's about the Bad Time. A swollen red image I'm trying to exorcise. Something I'll never forget because it sits on my bed when I go to sleep at night and sometimes I wake up with it sitting on my chest, breathing its hot stink in my face.

Maybe I could get rid of the f.u.c.kness, but I will never get rid of the Bad Time.

Chapter One.

The Cloud Factory.

Anyway, I was real dumb back then. Back then it felt like hate marrowed all my bones and the people around me were colorless, quivering ma.s.ses, their shapeless mouths opening to coax my soul from my body. But I want you to know that I knew I was dumb. Or at least that I appeared dumb to most people. I wasn't so much head dumb as body dumb. I just wanted to be alone to twitch and wiggle and hum, the few things that made me happy, and it felt like everyone else wanted to stop me from doing those things. Like those things had any impact on how they lived their lives. The only thing I could figure was most people were so f.u.c.king self-righteous they liked to destroy others' wills so they felt like their own petty lives had some sense of purpose.

So the Bad Time began on the playground of Milltown Middle School.

No, that's not really true. All of the troubles I'd been having coalesced there on the playground. That playground was where I would eventually set myself free. Not an external, everlasting kind of freedom, but a freedom of the mind-a discovery of how it would feel to be free. I had a number of troubles at Milltown Middle School, most on account of my being sixteen and in the eighth grade, but this f.u.c.kness I'm getting ready to tell you about was what lead to my quest-except I think of it more as a stumbling than a quest. Milltown was like a fulcrum, there in the middle of a whole series of events that happened before and would happen after the Bad Time, an intricate web of f.u.c.kness that felt like it was intended to wipe me out completely. It probably had something to do with body chemicals.

Some people just seemed born to fail.

But, right now, I'll stick to telling you my story about Bucky Swarth and his gang. I'm still kind of dumb, my mind wanders.

Milltown Middle School was where the poor kids in Milltown went to school. Milltown was a large, industrialized city in southwestern Ohio, somewhere between Dayton and Cincinnati, that had several elementary and middle schools. It was one of the larger towns in the area with some 40,000 residents. Because all these schools were located in neighborhoods and the kids living in those neighborhoods went to the closest schools, they were more or less divided by financial status. A lot of the poor parents complained because they had real smart kids but, because the rest of the poor parents couldn't afford Ritalin, they thought their children weren't getting as good of an education as the rich, heavily medicated kids.

The kids knew this wasn't true. Most of the rich little s.h.i.ts just took their Ritalin down to the park by Milltown Middle and sold it anyway. No, it was just part of the game. The poor were supposed to be stupid. The rich smart. But I didn't really care about any of that f.u.c.kness. I was dumb, poor, and completely unmedicated.

By the time these kids made it to high school, they were either all thrown together in Milltown High, which was in a little nicer, newer section of town, or they went to the Catholic high school, Saint Agnes. A lot of kids ended up going to St. Ag even if they weren't actually Catholic because it was in the absolute nicest section of town and was mostly white and more ordered and that kind of f.u.c.kall. Apparently the parents thought being lorded over by stiff-lipped s.a.d.i.s.tic nuns and boyflesh hungry priests would really do their kids some good. When the richer kids got to that high school, the public high school, was when their parents started griping. They said they were afraid that their weak- chinned little f.u.c.ks were going to get hurt in that school because it was so combined. "The guns! What about the guns!" they'd whine in the papers. Did anyone ever tell them they were the reason their kids took guns to school in the first place? Combined? What the h.e.l.l did that mean, anyway? I always took it to mean they didn't want their kids to go to school with the blacks and the poor kids.

Sometimes, if the parent of a poor kid could afford to send their child to St. Ag, they did. I guess they thought that once their kid was actually in that school, all decked out in that uniform, no one could actually tell how poor they were. Those poor kids' parents must have been really deluded blobs, thinking their kids weren't still going to smell poor and talk poor. You can never really hide poor. Like blood, it courses through the veins.

Anyway, like I was saying, Milltown Middle School was in a poor section of town. The only reason it had the honor of bearing Milltown's name, if that was in fact an honor, was because it was the first middle school built. It was back there with all the factories and f.u.c.kness. The factories were where all the poor people worked, if they actually had jobs. Apparently if the workers could keep their minds and bodies intact long enough, there was a good pension involved. After so many years and enough overtime, there was even the hope they could ingrain themselves firmly into the middle cla.s.s.

Milltown Middle was small and dark and in a horrible state of disrepair. The outside of the school used to be red brick but had turned a dark brown from all the pollution. The playground was very small and dark, also. It was maybe about the size of one of the richer people's back yard. The school was up near the sidewalk, just off the road. There was a three-story parking garage to the right of the school, on the north side. The Korl Brothers factory b.u.t.ted up against the fence of the playground and sort of wrapped around the south side. It was a steel mill, so not only was there the distraction of those tweedling half-wits coming and going to work, there was also the clanging and clunking of giant sheets of metal being hurled around by even noisier machines. The main building of the factory had once been sort of a greenish-gray corrugated aluminum structure, the pride of Milltown's economy, but was all soot-covered and rusted when I went to Milltown. All those structures smothered the playground, burying it, looming ominously over top of it. On that day, the day I'm trying to tell you about, huge smokestacks rose into the cold gray March sky, pumping out their smoke and fire.

When I was a real young kid and a lot dumber than I am now, dumber even than when I went to Milltown, I used to think that factory was where clouds were made. Whenever the parents would drive me by Korl or one of Milltown's numerous other factories, I'd say, "Look at the pretty clouds!"

I thought the black smoke and flashing orange-white fire brought the thunderstorms and the white steam made the cottage cheese-looking clouds you see on somewhat pleasant days. My father, Racecar, would snarl, "Those ain't clouds, a.s.s, that's a Death Factory."

Him saying that changed my whole cloud perspective and I began to think the smoke was caused by burning bodies, which was closer to the truth, I guess. The father blamed the Korl Brothers for taking his legs and making him an angry gimp. A hunk of compressed metal had fallen off a forklift and crushed the father's legs so badly they had to be removed. The factory paid for the operation but avoided a settlement for years, saying it was the father's fault. I guess they just figured Racecar was in the wrong place at the wrong time. When they finally decided to pay him it amounted to about what he would have made for working two years, which was inconsequential, considering he'd never be able to work again.

There really wasn't anything to play on in the playground at Milltown Middle. There was an old rusted swing set we were forbidden to play on and an extremely dangerous-looking contraption called the witch's hat that hardly anyone would dare to even go around, ever since Lenny Lester got gored a few years back. Still, if someone dared, like some new kid who hadn't heard about the goring, it was forbidden. Those objects sat there, temptation for the bored, a punishment waiting to happen. If the teachers didn't get you, the contraption would, sooner or later.

The majority of the children were left to run around somewhat aimlessly on the playground unless they wanted to engage in games like Tag or Ring-Around-the-Rosy or another game called Red Rover. Red Rover involved two teams and each team was to send one of its members "over" to the other team when that member was called. All the kids had to know everybody else's name to play this because you had to say, "Red Rover, Red Rover, send blah over," or some f.u.c.kness. This game, on occasion, would turn violent and have to be stopped. The kids at Milltown managed to make just about everything violent. Even Tag usually ended in bruises and tears as though a more apt t.i.tle would have been "Beat" or "Strike" or "Punish." It was rare for these games to actually be stopped, however. There usually weren't any teachers around to stop anything and if they were actually outside on the playground they had a convenient habit of looking away at the slightest hint of a disturbance.

Also, the gra.s.s in the playground was always covered in this soot so when the kids went in from recess their hands and clothes were always black and grimy. They wore that soot like a coat of poverty. If they rubbed their faces with their hands, they would leave giant smudge marks that looked like some form of tribal marking.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that there wasn't a whole h.e.l.luva lot to do out there on the Milltown Middle School playground and that's maybe sort of the reason why Bucky Swarth was exactly the way he was, which was real violent-like. There seemed to be a lot of that type at Milltown. They either all banded together to form a ma.s.sive, brow-ridged juggernaut, or they separated into various camps, destined to do battle for the rest of the school year.

Even though I was sixteen and most of the other kids were twelve or thirteen, I almost fit in; physically, anyway. That is, I think my proportions were about right. Even then, I was a little over six feet tall, but I'd been that tall since I was in the eighth grade for the first time. I was also rail thin and completely hairless, freckles all over my face.

If my proportions were about right for the eighth grade then my overall appearance wasn't right for any age. If I was going to be tall for my age and stick out like a sore thumb anyway, then the least I could have been blessed with was decent if not just plain looks. But this was not the case... I was ugly, almost freakishly so. An ugly person, a regular ugly person who isn't cursed with being terribly ugly, can go through life with virtually no problems at all. They may have issues with their self-esteem and all that f.u.c.kness, but there is absolutely no attention paid them and they're able to just muck around and pretty much do whatever the h.e.l.l they want. The extremely good-looking can get through life fairly easily, but that's just because people will agree with what they say so they can f.u.c.k them or sometimes just be seen with them. And they're almost always attracting some sort of attention, but it's usually positive. The exceptionally ugly, like me, weren't going to be given any breaks in life. More than likely, we were the subjects of intense ridicule. Maybe some pity. What's worse is that I also, through the sheer uniqueness of my appearance, always had attention hoisted upon me. The attention was always negative, of course.

Because I'd grown so fast, I no longer had the ability to walk with a normal gait, so I lasciviously scuffled along, my feet rarely leaving the ground. It seemed like my eyeb.a.l.l.s were made too big for their actual eyelids, creating the impression that my eyes were never fully opened but simply slits, like some big doped up snake. My mouth suffered some of the same circ.u.mstances. It was too small, the teeth shoved in there with demented abstract abandon-what the mother called a "crowded mouth." My canines hung down way past all the other teeth and if I tried to actually shut my mouth to where my lips met I looked like someone trying to form a horribly pompous face. Nevertheless, I kept my mouth fully closed most of the time and this may have generated more hostility toward me. My ears were like giant masts. If I slithered fast enough I could actually hear them slicing the wind.

Both years since I started failing, I had to go through a readjustment period and try not to let anyone in my cla.s.s figure out that I was two or three years older than they were. It was hard enough to remain anonymous, being a hideous beast. And it never lasted very long. Inevitably, some other failure would point me out. "Well, that kid, he's failed twice."

After that happened, the stares and whispers would noticeably increase. I figured some of the parents told the kids to stay away from me. I guess they were afraid my ample helping of stupid would rub off on their children.

I always hated recess because I've never really liked having what the other kids considered fun. Playing stupid games and running around aimlessly and that kind of f.u.c.kall. So mostly I just wandered around the big rusty fence separating the playground from the factory and thought my own thoughts, which mostly involved ways of getting out of Milltown without much of an education and by doing as little work as possible. Recess was always a bad time anyway because it was one of the only times when being completely alone seemed abnormal. When it finally got out that I was Wallace Black, the dumb boy who couldn't pa.s.s the eighth grade, recess was when the bullies started laying into me.

That year, the Year of Bucky Swarth's Reign, I'd been pretty okay. That is, I'd avoided being beaten severely by him. I'd never been the subject of more than a few names, threats, or pushes. I think, initially, even though I wasn't particularly hard to notice, they were kind of intimidated by my age and I had to do something to really p.i.s.s them off before they decided to let me have it. But on that chilly spring day, he finally came around and, looking back on it, it was probably my own d.a.m.n stupid fault.

It was a Thursday morning, the year more than half gone, when he finally laid into me.

Chapter Two.

Drifter Ken and The Sucker of Doom That morning, on my walk to school, Drifter Ken had given me a big green sucker. Drifter Ken was this magnificent old guy who hung around the park between my house and the school. He was real suspicious but n.o.body ever caught him doing anything so they couldn't do much about it, like having him locked up or some f.u.c.kness like that. Besides, he never panhandled and he was never in the park at night. I just thought Drifter Ken liked kids or that being nice to the kids that came through the park gave him something to do with his day. The mother always said to stay away from Drifter Ken because he really liked kids, but she wore a wig and I found her hard to trust.

If I ever got home late from school, she would accuse me of hanging out with that "trashy, trashy man," her stroke-induced mumbling giving the words a l.u.s.ty cant. The way she strumbled on about Drifter Ken made it sound like he was the type of man she'd like to bring home.

"You like what he does to you?" she asked me one time.

I had a pretty good idea of what she was talking about and knew Drifter Ken sure didn't do that. I mean, it wouldn't really surprise me if he had managed to nail a couple of the high school girls but it wasn't abnormal to see the high schoolers dating 35 to 40-year- old men. So what if Drifter Ken was closer to 60? In a town like Milltown, the general philosophy seemed to be that you had to snag them young, before pregnancy, drugs, alcoholism, and bad fashion used them up.

"You like the way that trashy, trashy man touches you?" It disgusted me, the throatiness of her voice.

"He's not like that."

"Not yet."

At that point, I grabbed a heavy gla.s.s and threw it across the room. The motion was strained and dramatic but I had trouble expressing myself vocally, so I had a tendency to throw and break things. Then I stormed into my room. It was pointless to argue with the mother.

It was the father's theory that Drifter Ken sold crack to the kids but, as I've already mentioned, the father was crippled and also untrustworthy. I'm guessing the father thought an adult would have to be high to get along with children.

Anyway, that morning I walked through the park as I always did. Some mornings Drifter Ken wasn't there. On the mornings he was in the park we always exchanged a few words, even if it was to just say "Hi." It was like we both understood each other. You can make contact with people all day but it only seems fulfilling when it's with someone you truly enjoy.

Drifter Ken was of near giant proportions. I was a little over six feet tall and had to look way up at Drifter Ken. His thick hands were the size of baseball mitts. He had flashy hair, all stiff and gray and piled up on top of his head in wild curls. That made him seem even taller. I thought about Racecar, pathetically sitting in his wheelchair and growling and I thought dads should always be taller than their children, if only by an inch or two. Drifter Ken would have been the perfect father for me. He always sucked on these unfiltered Camels that drew attention to his magnificent teeth. I say his teeth were magnificent because they had character. Teeth can really make or break a person. Drifter Ken's teeth were powerful, like giant evenly s.p.a.ced blocks, the area between them defining them even further, making them blockier and more magnificent. I complimented him on his teeth one time, mainly so I could tell him about Mrs. Pearlbottom's, and he said hers probably got that way from chewing kids' a.s.ses. I laughed. I laughed at a lot of what Drifter Ken said. Drifter Ken was a funny man.

That morning, Drifter Ken had a surprise for me. I was pa.s.sing through the park kind of quickly because I was already running a little late and I just raised my hand in a wave and nodded to him when he came rushing over to me.

"Hey there, Wally, whaddya say?" Most of our encounters were horribly repet.i.tive but there was a deep sense of comfort to this repet.i.tion.

"Oh, not much, Drifter Ken." I used to call him "Mister," but he insisted I call him "Ken." It felt weird calling a grownup by his first name. And never mind that, at sixteen, I was almost a grownup myself. Since I was in the eighth grade, I still considered myself a child. And since I was well on my way to failing eighth grade again I considered myself even more of a child than the other eighth graders. I was downright feeble-minded. What the f.u.c.k did it matter what I called him, anyway? Names are ridiculous and the only thing more ridiculous than a name is a t.i.tle.

"Hey Wally, I gotcha a little somethin."

"Oh yeah? Thanks." I didn't have any idea what it would be. I sure hoped it wasn't crack.

It wasn't. It was a giant green sucker.

It wasn't that I was ungrateful or anything. I guess I just expected something different. It seemed kind of hokey at first, like something you'd give to a baby. But a sucker was a sucker and I didn't really think you ever got too old for candy.

"Now you hide that from the teachers at that school. Tell you what to do... you save it til you go to recess, then you find some place nice and quiet and you enjoy that there lollipop."

I took the sucker and held it, feeling its heft. I nodded to Drifter Ken.

"Listen here now... you enjoy the h.e.l.l out of that lollipop."

"I sure will," I said.

"Hey, say Wally, you got any good jokes for me?"

"I have to get to school."

"Run on then. A good joke gets better with time."

I usually tried to tell Drifter Ken all the jokes I'd heard. Sometimes they were horribly lame but it gave us something to talk about. I hated having to leave Drifter Ken's company so I could go to that miserable f.u.c.khouse of a school.

So, anyway, I got to school that Thursday only a few minutes late. All I could think about was that big, bulgy green sucker in the right front pocket of my pants and I couldn't wait until recess. I didn't think I'd be able to eat all of it and I'd have to save the wrapper so I could store the rest of it until after school. That way I could enjoy the h.e.l.l out of it on my way home, too. Drifter Ken, if he was still in the park, which he almost always was after school, would be happy to see me enjoying the h.e.l.l out of that sucker. And the thing kind of kept me behaved, too. A lot of times I'd have to skip recess and stay inside with the surly Miss Pearlbottom, who was one of the biggest blobs I'd ever seen.

There was this one time when I had a fantastic vision about fat old Pearlbottom. In the vision, she wore one of those hideous floral-patterned dresses. It hung flappingly from her giant b.u.t.tocks. Her a.s.s was so huge it looked like she had children stuck in there. For no reason whatsoever, there was this cow in the hall of the school. Pearlbottom, with a grace I'd never seen her obtain before was on this creature in a heartbeat, driving it to the ground with her girth. After wrestling it down to the floor, she began to rapidly devour it, poking her fingers into its flesh, moving pieces of it around with her pudgy little fingers in search of the choicest bites. The entire cow was gone in minutes. In my dream, I looked on, horrified, like it had been a brash act of cannibalism or something. Finishing her meal she looked up at me, wiping the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand and picking some of the cow's coa.r.s.e hide out of her teeth, looking as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Needless to say, I was shaken upon awakening.

Most days, I'd have to stay in from recess for doing something real stupid like sitting back in my little desk and flipping my head back and forth on my shoulders while singing some stupid s.h.i.t like, "Da doo doo doo," or some f.u.c.kall like that.

Pearlbottom reminded me of someone who should be working at a truck stop, not in a school. She'd tell me to stop acting out. Sometimes she would tell me that I was way off task, like I was supposed to know what the h.e.l.l that meant.