The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (3 page)

So you get the idea. I was dipped and battered and buttered and way deep fried in the idea of the hero; the idea that what was noble could stand against anything what was not; that a good man need do no more than put his chest out, keep his eyes lifted, and plod forward; bullies were cowards and dogs were your friends. Right against wrong. Good against evil. America against them.

And then, the sixties rose up over the horizon, head first, long-haired and skeptical, and things went topsy. I learned a valuable lesson. A lot of what I had been taught about right and wrong, the simplicity of it, the American view, was not exactly on the money. Certain dreams and illusions were crucified on the crosses of reality, and though some of those dreams climbed down from the cross, alive and breathing, if a little wounded, the dead ones remained dead, not risen, not reborn, just dead. Same as Jesus, I might add.

So, like the Lone Ranger, I rode on into the shadow of change, the nineteen-sixties, and when I rode out, I was a different person, still masked, still riding, but my clothes were ripped and dirty and the hat was gone, the long-haired head I now possessed was bowed, and the horse, man, he was tired. My view on dogs, though, even tired and barely mounted, has never changed. They’re still way cool. And I suppose I have to mention cats in passing. I wish them the best, including my two, but I was never crazy about them.

Backtrack.

The wind of the sixties started to build after the death of John F. Kennedy, who gave our country a big dose of hope and respect for intelligence, education, and longer hairdos. When he was gone something ripped in the fabric of space and time, and from those dimensions something crawled free that could only be seen out of the corner of the eye during a certain moment in the day when the light was right (or wrong), and that something was a reality check.

Even the good can die.

Even the young can die.

Nothing happens to you if you wear white after Labor Day.

I started reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, bless her violent heart, and Carson McCullers and William S.

Burroughs (interesting, but no fan here), and so many others, and they touched me, because they were about people, they were about ideas; and then came Chandler and Hammett and Cain with people who talked like people I knew. Complex stories, not necessarily always better, but different, and there was a bleed over in my mind between literary and pulp, comics and the art of Peter Max, Remington, and Dalí, men on horses and melting clocks.

A wind started to blow, turned sour and hot, picked up in force. At first the wind just brought us tie-dyed T-shirts and longer hair than even Kennedy wore, some cool music with loud guitars, The Beatles, by God, and there were good things in this strong wind, like civil rights, and recognition that the Viet Nam War might not be one of America’s good wars. For a brief romantic moment it looked as if the world could change, that we could be those brave and good and heroic people of our comic book dreams… But it was just a moment. That door slammed, and then came too many disappointments, the stupidity of drugs, and finally hate, on both sides, and the wind became a tornado of confusion. Our country split between straights and freaks, liberals and conservatives. Kind of the way it is now, only worse.

I dropped out of college.

I was drafted.

I refused to go.

I was told I’d go to prison.

I didn’t. Thank goodness.

They ended up giving me a rating called I-Y, which meant they drafted criminals before they drafted me. I didn’t think right. I didn’t agree. There was, according to them, something wrong with my head. I was against America’s absolute and certain rightness, which, I no longer believed. Not because I had lost the ethics I had learned from my heroes, but because I suddenly realized our country, not as a whole, but in many places and a variety of ways, didn’t abide by the ethics, the goodness that it presented in its comics and TV shows. I was shocked to discover that life was more complicated and full of liars and back-stabbing assholes. Not just the obvious villains, but the folks we were supposed to respect.

I learned from my mother that racial hatred was wrong. That women could be trained to do what men could do; that they weren’t inferior, just different. My father taught me to be a skeptic, not a paranoid, but someone who wasn’t afraid to question the “facts.” I dropped out. I didn’t drink and didn’t take drugs, but I did find a place to farm and relax and to avoid the world for a while. I went back to the land with a stack of books and a wonderful wife. I love

my country, but not blindly. I love my wife blindly. I love my family blindly. And, of course, the dog.

I began to write. I found it to be the best way to deal with life, all of my anger and disappointment went into the work; a reason so much of it is violent and weird, dear hearts.

Life and literature and film and comics and race relations (or lack there of) and my disappointment over lying politicians and stupid wars and hatred of anything different or strange or not of America all rolled together with my new found interests in anthropology and archeology and sociology and psychology, surrealism and experimental ideas, and what first came out was just some rehash of things that had gone before, and then at some point, the scab popped off and the pus that was me leaked out, and it produced…

Stories… so many stories. It’s hard to believe that it was me who wrote them. Or some version of me, the me that was me at the time.

I apologize for the trip to get you here, to tell you some of the things that I loved that led to these stories based on my crucified dreams. Many of my early truths were sabotaged, but not entirely lost. Some, like a broken boat, are still floating on the surface of the water, but amidst a howling storm with nothing left but the devil and the deep blue sea.

This is some of the refuse left from my boat, scooped out with a net. My childhood passions remain in the fragments, sometimes in the ripped cloth of the sails, and even those pieces of the boat that are intact are not without stains. This then is an overview of my work over the past thirty-five years. Little is presented here from the very early years, but nothing here is without the experience of those years. These stories are all of me and I am all of them. They are not the totality of my life, but they are a portion of my life, and my life is often expressed in them, if only metaphorically and symbolically. I hope at least some of them will appeal to you, that in many cases sparks will fly and they will serve as some kind of fuel for your internal combustion engine. I hope there might be an insight, an occasional profundity. And if there are none of these things, may they at least entertain you, the most important part of any story.

These stories are only a few of the stories I have produced. There are many more out there, some good, some better, a few, if you’ll pardon the conceit, that are very good, and a few that are like obnoxious relatives whose kinship you’d rather not admit to. But these are the ones we have chosen. These are the ones that allow readers interested in my work to stand back and look at the variety.

How should you feel about them? Obviously, I leave that to you. I hope you will like them enough to seek out others, and I hope, there will be many more to come.

And so the paint mixer winds down and the nostalgia dries up, and in the end, what I have written is probably nothing more than the old saw about the sound and the fury signifying nothing.

But it’s my nothing.

ONE: H
ONEST
W
ORK

Godzilla, on his way to work at the foundry, sees a large building that seems to be mostly made of shiny copper and dark, reflecting solar glass. He sees his image in the glass and thinks of the old days, wonders what it would be like to stomp on the building, to blow flames at it, kiss the windows black with his burning breath, then dance rapturously in the smoking debris.

One day at a time, he tells himself. One day at a time.

Godzilla makes himself look at the building hard. He passes it by. He goes to the foundry. He puts on his hard hat. He blows his fiery breath into the great vat full of used car parts, turns the car parts to molten metal. The metal runs through pipes and into new molds for new car parts. Doors. Roofs. Etc.

Godzilla feels some of the tension drain out.

TWO
:
RECREATION

After work Godzilla stays away from downtown. He feels tense. To stop blowing flames after work is difficult. He goes over to the BIG MONSTER RECREATION CENTER.

Gorgo is there. Drunk from oily seawater, as usual. Gorgo talks about the old days. She’s like that. Always the old days.

They go out back and use their breath on the debris that is deposited there daily for the center’s use. Kong is out back. Drunk as a monkey. He’s playing with Barbie dolls. He does that all the time. Finally, he puts the Barbies away in his coat pocket, takes hold of his walker and wobbles past Godzilla and Gorgo.

Gorgo says, “Since the fall he ain’t been worth shit. And what’s with him and the little plastic broads anyway? Don’t he know there’s real women in the world?”

Godzilla thinks Gorgo looks at Kong’s departing walker-supported ass a little too wistfully. He’s sure he sees wetness in Gorgo’s eyes.

Godzilla blows some scrap to cinders for recreation, but it doesn’t do much for him, as he’s been blowing fire all day long and has, at best, merely taken the edge off his compulsions. This isn’t even as satisfying as the foundry. He goes home.

THREE: S
EX AND
D
ESTRUCTION

That night there’s a monster movie on television. The usual one. Big beasts wrecking havoc on city after city. Crushing pedestrians under foot.

Godzilla examines the bottom of his right foot, looks at the scar there from stomping cars flat. He remembers how it was to have people squish between his toes. He thinks about all of that and changes the channel. He watches twenty minutes of
Mr. Ed
, turns off the TV, masturbates to the images of burning cities and squashing flesh.

Later, deep into the night, he awakens in a cold sweat. He goes to the bathroom and quickly carves crude human figures from bars of soap. He mashes the soap between his toes, closes his eyes and imagines. Tries to remember.

FOUR: B
EACH
T
RIP AND
T
HE
B
IG
T
URTLE

Saturday, Godzilla goes to the beach. A drunk monster that looks like a big turtle flies by and bumps Godzilla. The turtle calls Godzilla a name, looking for a fight. Godzilla remembers the turtle is called Gamera.

Gamera is always trouble. No one liked Gamera. The turtle was a real asshole.

Godzilla grits his teeth and holds back the flames. He turns his back and walks along the beach. He mutters a secret mantra given him by his sponsor. The giant turtle follows after, calling him names.

Godzilla packs up his beach stuff and goes home. At his back he hears the turtle, still cussing, still pushing. It’s all he can do not to respond to the big dumb bastard. All he can do. He knows the turtle will be in the news tomorrow. He will have destroyed something, or will have been destroyed himself.

Godzilla thinks perhaps he should try and talk to the turtle, get him on the twelve-step program. That’s what you’re supposed to do. Help others. Maybe the turtle could find some peace.

But then again, you can only help those who help themselves. Godzilla realizes he cannot save all the monsters of the world. They have to make these decisions for themselves. But he makes a mental note to go armed with leaflets about the twelve-step program from now on.

Later, he calls in to his sponsor. Tells him he’s had a bad day. That he wanted to burn buildings and fight the big turtle. Reptilicus tells him it’s okay. He’s had days like that. Will have days like that once again.

Once a monster, always a monster. But a recovering monster is where it’s at. Take it one day at a time. It’s the only way to be happy in the world. You can’t burn and kill and chew up humans and their creations without paying the price of guilt and multiple artillery wounds.

Godzilla thanks Reptilicus and hangs up. He feels better for a while, but deep down he wonders just how much guilt he really harbors. He thinks maybe it’s the artillery and the rocket-firing jets he really hates, not the guilt.

FIVE: O
FF THE
W
AGON

It happens suddenly. He falls off the wagon. Coming back from work he sees a small doghouse with a sleeping dog sticking halfway out of a doorway. There’s no one around. The dog looks old. It’s on a chain. Probably miserable anyway. The water dish is empty. The dog is living a worthless life. Chained. Bored. No water.

Godzilla leaps and comes down on the doghouse and squashes dog in all directions. He burns what’s left of the doghouse with a blast of his breath. He leaps and spins on tip-toe through the wreckage. Black cinders and cooked dog slip through his toes and remind him of the old days.

He gets away fast. No one has seen him. He feels giddy. He can hardly walk he’s so intoxicated. He calls Reptilicus, gets his answering machine. “I’m not in right now. I’m out doing good. But please leave a message, and I’ll get right back to you.”

The machine beeps. Godzilla says, “Help.”

SIX: His S
PONSOR

The doghouse rolls around in his head all the next day. While at work he thinks of the dog and the way it burned. He thinks of the little house and the way it crumbled. He thinks of the dance he did in the ruins.

The day drags on forever. He thinks maybe when work is through he might find another doghouse, another dog.

On the way home he keeps an eye peeled, but no dog houses or dogs are seen.

When he gets home his answering machine light is blinking. It’s a message from Reptilicus. Reptilicus’s voice says, “Call me.”