Poppy Z. Brite – Used Stories
ISBN: 978-88-99569-11-2
Copyright (Edition) ©2016 Independent Legions Publishing
Copyright (Text) ©Poppy Z. Brite
1° edition epub/mobipocket: 1.0 June 2016
Digital Layout: Lukha B. Kremo -
[email protected] Cover Art by Vincent Chong
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Do you have the 12”on Pink Vinyl?
by Poppy Z. Brite;
Toxic Wastrels; Homewrecker; Essence of Rose; Nailed; The Goose Girl.
The collection has been originally published by Subterranean Press (2004).
www.independentlegions.com
Poppy Z. Brite
Used Stories
INTRODUCTION
DO YOU HAVE THE 12” ON PINK VINYL?
(a few words about used stories)
by Poppy Z. Brite
Congratulations! You’re a completist. I hope you feel the same cozy, acquisitive thrill I used to get when I’d flip through the record bins and happen upon some obscure piece of vinyl by a band only a few dozen Americans had ever heard of. The Internet has surely made these things easier, maybe too easy to be as much fun any more. Even so, you hold in your hands an EP of my rarest B-sides. (Do you remember EPs and B-sides, or are you part of the CD Generation?)
I wanted to call this book Crappy Stories, but I didn’t think Bill at Subterranean Press would go for it. Instead I borrowed a title from one of my favorite musicians, Tom Waits, whose retrospective compilation album is called “Used Songs.” Tom’s leftovers are better than my eight-course meals, to mix a metaphor, and he is not otherwise to blame for any of this. What it is, is a mini-collection of stories I haven’t included in any of my three full-length collections. Mostly I just didn’t like them well enough to put them in a book. But you write me letters asking when they’ll be collected, and when I say they won’t be, you ask if I can possibly sell you a copy of whatever obscure anthology they originally appeared in, and if I say I can’t, you go looking for the damn thing on eBay or ABEbooks and probably pay way too much for it. I know how your twitchy collector’s mind works. I’ve been there.
So here they are, with dirty T-shirts and snotty noses and forged excuses in their grubby little hands.
“Toxic Wastrels” was written in 1992 for Richard Chizmar’s eco-horror anthology The Earth Strikes Back. Because parts of it later insinuated themselves into my novel Exquisite Corpse, I never included it in any of my story collections. I remembered it was as a stupid story, and it is, but upon rereading it recently I also found it pretty funny and a more realistic depiction of Louisiana than some of the “serious” stuff I wrote around the same time.
There’s no such excuse for “Homewrecker”, written circa 1995 to amuse my friends Caitlin and Jennifer. It was meant as a catty, private parody of a writer we disliked, and when I hauled it out of the filing cabinet because I hadn’t written the story I’d promised to the erotic webzine Getting It, I think I sold a small piece of my soul. I’m appalled that this story—arguably amusing but ultimately dreck—has been reprinted in two best-of collection, Best American Erotica 2000 and The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women (though I didn’t particularly think of it as a vampire story when I wrote it). That just goes to show something, but I’m not sure I want to know what.
“Essence of Rose” first saw light as the prologue of a novel that was, thankfully, never written (around 1991, I think). There were things in it I liked, and in 1998 I rewrote it for the webzine Nerve. Unfortunately, in revision it became a run-of-the-mill “erotic” horror story full of the usual gothy, voodoo-y New Orleans clichés, and lost what I now consider to be its only memorable image: that of the protagonist being thrown off the interior balcony of a high-rise hotel and falling through a 30-story atrium into several huge panes of glass. (No, I’m not including the lost atrium scene, this is an EP of B-sides, not outtakes.)
“Nailed” was a lesson in humility, since I wrote it after being invited to contribute to a major horror anthology and the editor promptly rejected it. Other than the flap over Exquisite Corpse (which has been recounted elsewhere), I think it was my first rejection in about ten years and it was probably good for me. I eventually sold the story to the anthology Taps and Sighs. Though it’s atmospheric, it doesn’t ultimately seem to make a great deal of sense and I can’t blame the first editor for rejecting it. It’s a good example of the inadvisability (at least for me) of writing a story based on a vivid image rather than a compelling character: I’d seen nail fetishes in the curio shops of the French Quarter and thought they would be nifty props for a horror story.
“The Goose Girl” is a nice enough little story, I suppose. I wrote it around 1999 for J.K. Potter’s Embrace the Mutations, an anthology of fiction based on his twisted and disquieting photographs, and it is full of images from the beautiful photo that inspired it. I don’t much like the story in retrospect, though, because I see myself reaching back for the things people expected me to write about rather than things that really inspired me.
(Since Potter photographed me on several occasions, some people have asked me why I didn’t choose a photograph of myself to write about, and all I can tell them—in a slightly bewildered voice—is that I am not that kind of narcissist.)
There you are, then: five B-sides, mostly not up to the standards of the stories that comprise the collections, but it’s all a matter of opinion, anyway. I hope you find something to enjoy here, but if you just want to squirrel it away and take pleasure in having it, that’s OK too. Like I said, I’ve been there.
—PZB, New Orleans, LA, July 2003
TOXIC WASTRELS
Monday, May 20
Cuttacaloosa, Louisiana
In the swelter of the swamp—in the fresh batch of springtime muck just beginning to steam with the accumulated heat of long Louisiana days—in the roots of the oak and cypress and in every ashen frond of their Spanish-moss beards, in the jeweled red eyes of gators and the million iridescent wings of gnat-swarms that hung like glittering spirits over pools of stagnant water—in all of these, poison waited to be born.
The swamp was lush and fertile and always wet; it spread itself wide and welcomed all comers into the softness of its dark night-scented mud. The swamp was the egg, and the factory with its giant nozzles and gargantuan hoses, the factory with its great fat black smokestack jutting up into the humid sky, the factory held the seed and could manufacture it a billion times over if necessary.
But only one was needed.
Puss Robicheaux left the cold stone comfort of Charity Hospital late in the afternoon and hurried down Tulane Avenue in the direction of the French Quarter. At Carondelet he turned left and crossed the gaudy thoroughfare of Canal Street, then ducked down Bourbon and was soon in the heart of the Quarter.
At this time of year, New Orleans was balmy, almost tropical; the days were long and warm and steamy, with intervals of rain and sunshine in quick succession. Puss wore a light jacket made of some synthetic fabric that shimmered with iridescent colors. It was an expensive piece of clothing, but it hung on him awkwardly, his thin wrists jutting from the sleeves like chicken bones. His sparse, longish fair hair blew about in the breeze off the river, despite the print scarf he had tied over it. As he walked, he trailed one bony, beringed hand along the ornate spikes of a wrought iron railing, then along the timeworn texture of old brick.
The afternoon light was very clear, with an almost greenish cast, when Puss reached Jackson Square. He rendezvoused with a tall, leather-clad, deathly beautiful boy at the western corner of the square, near the cathedral. Puss knew the boy only slightly—he was of a newer breed than Puss’ old crowd—but the boy obviously knew who he was; he palmed the two crisp h
undred-dollar bills Puss offered with no flicker of surprise, then slipped Puss a sealed, unmarked manila envelope.
“It’s real clean,” the boy murmured through rouged lips. “Something called ‘Nuke,’ from California I think. You won’t need to do more than one at time—two tops”
“In that case, we’re stocked up.” Puss tucked the envelope into the fuchsia silk lining of his jacket. “Would you care to join us tonight?”
“Sorry. Big party at Pasko’s—it’s Drag Night, you should come.” The boy turned and walked quickly down one of the cobblestone alleys that led away from the square. The spires of the cathedral loomed oppressively overhead. The boy’s refusal had been too fast, and Puss caught a glimmer of something distasteful—pity, revulsion? —in the elegantly shadowed recesses of his eyes.
It was humiliating to be brushed off by these goddam brats of nineteen or twenty. But through his shame Puss still felt a flicker of desire. He wished he could have brought the boy home with him, brought him to meet The Artist. The Artist would have known what to do with those innocent lips, those slyly condescending eyes.
The children of the French Quarter fringe scene didn’t trust Puss, though they allowed him into their circle because he bought them vast quantities of drinks and drugs without batting an eye. As long as he was willing to pay for the pleasure of their company, they were willing to sell. And surely he was something of a curiosity to them. Once, he believed, he could have been more. If he had shaken off the clutches of his family and given up the ancestral home he loved. If no one knew his last name.
He had been called Puss since he could remember, but always wrote out his full legal name—Christopher Lance Robicheaux—whenever he had to sign something, because people tended to read his nickname as “Pus”, a seeping bodily fluid, rather than “Puss”, a luxuriant, furred pet. He had signed Christopher Lance on the guest register at the hospital before going up to see his pain-besotted mother, with her shriveling, collapsing face and her rotting brain behind it. When the cancer was discovered marbling her temporal lobes like that fat on a particularly tender cut of meat, Puss had installed her in Charity Hospital rather than the posh private place where his father and older brother Carmen had died of the same cancer, ten and five years earlier respectively. He put her there because he knew the reporters and ravening environmentalists would never expect to find a Robicheaux dying in the hands of Charity. He put her there because the family was no longer as rich as anyone believed, and he refused to give up the house to the tolls of sickness and rot. But most of all he put her there because she had not wanted to go, because she was afraid of the place, and so Puss knew she would die faster in Charity. It was an act of mercy, a small evil for a greater good.
He decided to catch a trolley back to the hospital where he had parked his car, a rusting Cadillac that guzzled gasoline like champagne. But as he passed the Café du Monde on the way to the trolley stop, someone recognized him.
Three clean-cut little terrorists, to be exact, two moonfaced girls in Earth First! T-shirts and a lovely boy with a fashionable asymmetrical haircut and striking, Nazi-blue eyes. The boy jumped up, almost upsetting his cafe au lait and plate of beignets. “ROBICHEAUX!” he howled. “POISONER! MURDERER!” He vaulted over the iron railing of the cafe and ran toward Puss. The girls scrambled over the railing after him. “Shut it DOWN!” they began to chant.
The Café du Monde tourists gaped, and some raised their cameras to snap pictures. But a few street performers and assorted Quarter freaks around the cafe took up the chant. They all knew what it was about: “Shut it DOWN! Shut it DOWN!”
Puss kept walking. Behind him, he heard the boy’s voice raised in righteous anger. “We know who are you, Robicheaux! You look different, but you’re a murderer, just like the rest of your family!”
“People in Cuttacaloosa die of cancer at EIGHT TIMES the normal rate and their blood is on YOUR HANDS!” added one of the girls.
“Shut it DOWN… Shut it DOWN…” The chant followed Puss all the way to the top of the levee. He didn’t want to listen to it until the next trolley came; instead he started walking back along the river. The sky was just beginning to darken, and the air seemed thinner up here, suffused with a pre-sunset light. Puss stared down at the surging, glowing river as he walked. It was so mighty and so polluted; doubtless it had been the carrier and deliverer of more poisons than one insignificant factory could ever be. But no one called the Mississippi a murderer.
He reached inside his jacked and touched the manila envelope. Nuke, the deather boy had told him. One hundred doses of top-grade LSD; Puss tried to buy a sheet whenever he was in New Orleans. Psychedelics were difficult to come by in the swamp.
The drugs, at least, were a comfort.
Claude Augustine Robicheaux, Puss’ father, had built the factory thirty years ago. Land on the edge of the swamp was cheap, and the earth was just firm enough to support heavy machinery. Now the Robicheaux money was gone and the family business acumen had died with Puss’ older brother Carmen, but some part of Robicheaux Chemicals were still used for production. There were cauldrons of molten plastic and vats of seething, gnawing solvent. There were carefully contained pockets of hellfire that could incinerate ten tons of poison a day. In these parts of the squat and sprawling complex of buildings, everything seemed in syncopated motion, churning and thrusting and letting our little colored puffs of steam, as if any moment the factory might segue into genuine, animated life.
But most parts of the complex were no longer in use. There were tall boxlike rooms where the ceilings could not be seen overhead, so shrouded were they in cobwebs and shadow. There were vats still glazed with the residue of chemicals long drained or evaporated. There were spigots that still trailed long drips plastic frozen in the moment of falling; there was machinery mottled with strange patterns of rust. There were warrens of offices where the plaster on the walls seemed to echo with a faint moaning voice, as if something were forever lost in the maze of tiny fissures.
In Claude Robicheaux’s old office, a writhing, marbled pattern had spread over the walls, some sort of growth that no amount of disinfectant could remove for very long. Eventually the office had been locked and abandoned. Now the growth ran rampant over the walls and floor and ceiling, twisting itself into a thousand patterns that almost formed a whole: an intricate web of nerves and capillaries, a jagged line of brainwaves, a screaming, sobbing mouth.
Puss left New Orleans by way of Interstate 10, then turned onto U.S. 90, which corkscrewed down into the swamp. The twinkling cityscape receded behind him; before him was only darkness pierced by the wavering twin needles of the Caddy’s headlights. He turned on the tape player, and a frenetic, overamplified voice blared out at him: “THEY WERE WOMEN WHO LOVED OTHER WOMEN…AND THEY LOST THEIR HEADS OVER ONE ANOTHER…LITERALLY!” The only tape in the car was a collection of movie trailers Ivor had spliced together; that one, if Puss remembered correctly, was a softcore-porn costume drama about aristocratic lesbians during the French Revolution. Puss remembered how the camera had focused in on the shimmering razor-edge of the guillotine, then on the ragged neck-stumps, the blood spurting in sexual rhythm.
He had tried to get Ivor to come into the city with him today, thinking Ivor ought to see Mother once more before she died, not that Mother would benefit from it. But Ivor could have been an ally against the self-righteous brats at the Café du Monde. Perhaps they could even have stopped on Magazine Street and had a cocktail in some festive little bar. Puss had once liked the bars in New Orleans, with their air of year-round Carnival, but he hated drinking alone.
And Ivor would not go into the city any more, though he had spent most of teenage years trying to pass for a hoodlum in the seedier parts of the Quarter. Carmen had been the oldest Robicheaux son, expected to follow in his father’s wake; he had done so all too well. Ivor was the youngest, and he had always done exactly as he liked, taking pleasure in horrifying his parents, sucking up their money and their love. Puss was th
e middle son, and it had never seemed to matter what he did; no one ever noticed.
An hour out of New Orleans, he left the highway and turned onto a narrow hardtop road that twisted through miles of teeming swampland. Water lapped at the road on both sides; reeds and cattails hushed in his wake. Ghostly white egrets stalked the silent pools on jackstraw legs. Puss had seen gators on this stretch of road. The last part of the drive always seemed to go on forever. At last he swung to the right, coasted down a long, cypress-shrouded, mud-rutted driveway, and parked in front of a huge, spectral, mouldy wedding cake of a house.
The Robicheaux plantations was Puss’ birthright, even if no one in his family had wanted him to have it. It was the ancestral stronghold, with grounds that had once been home to acres of rice and sugarcane and—as Claude Robicheaux had always proudly pointed out—more than a thousand slaves.
But building a plantation house in the swamp was a little like sinking toothpicks into Jell-O and then trying to balance a lead weight on the toothpicks. For the past hundred years the ancestral stronghold had been slowly sinking into the morass. Now foul black mud covered most of the first floor windows and the house listed like a giant white-columned shipwreck. Ivor and Puss lived upstairs now; the first floor was dump and rotten, with evil-smelling water seeping through the fine Indian carpets and mould blossoming on the golden flocked wallpaper.
The house was surely Puss’ birthright, for he was the only one who could love it any more.
Blue light flickered in a single upstairs window. Ivor’s skinny frame would be immobile in front of the television, his bird-sharp face bathed in its phosphor glow. Puss walked up the overgrown alley of cypress and ascended the sloping steps of the porch. The front door was still clear of the encroaching mud, but only just. When that was covered, Puss supposed, they would go in and out the windows. Or rather, he would; Ivor never went out.