Tank Girl

by Alan C. Martin

  “Shit,” I said, “it’s been years since I’ve watched that movie. I can’t fuckin’ remember. I know it’s got the guy from Metal Mickey in it for sure... Fuck it, put down true.”

  Then the second question really upset the apple cart: “Name two ’60s acts that charted with songs called ‘Daydream’.”

  I scratched my head and puzzled away.

  Even Stevens drew a complete blank. “I can only think of one,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “but that’s because there was only one. Hang on a minute, I’m gonna have to take this up with the quizmaster.”

  I went up to the end of the bar where the quizmaster was sitting with his microphone, vino and quiz books. I could instantly tell that the guy was a complete geek: Hawaiian shirt, espadrilles, canvas trousers at half-mast, and an unkempt Magnum-style moustache – the marks of a man who wants to look like he’s on permanent vacation.

  “What’s the meaning of this question?” I asked pointedly.

  “What do you mean, ‘What’s the meaning of this question’?” he asked back.

  “The Lovin’ Spoonful were the only ones to have a hit with ‘Daydream’. And I should know – I’m in love with John Sebastian.”

  He picked up one of his quiz books and held it up like a shield that might’ve offered some protection for his weak personality. “That’s not what it says in here,” he countered in a wobbly voice. “The Monkees had a hit with another song called ‘Daydream’, so there.”

  I sighed a heavy sigh. I couldn’t be bothered to expend the energy. I mean, how much of a hopeless, tedious, boring cunt can one man be?

  I set him straight: “The Monkees’ hit was ‘Daydream Believer’, you fuckin’ homecomin’ queen. And I should know that as well – I’m also in love with Peter Tork.”

  I was losing the plot. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s people saying that The Monkees had a hit called ‘Daydream’.

  “Are you gonna give us the point, then, or what?” I snapped.

  “What?” he replied.

  “Okay,” I said, “if that’s your decision, then you’re gonna have to live with it.”

  I shot him in the espadrille, kicked him in the nuts, and gave him a cauliflower ear. I sensed the atmosphere of the room change as he buckled up and collapsed to the floor.

  Stevens was at my side in an instant, snatching my gun, grabbing me by the arm, and whispering, “Quick, let’s get the fuck out of here!” in my ear. He gave an official flash of his Sheriff’s badge to the crowd that was beginning to encircle us and marched me to the door.

  “Nothin’ to see here folks,” he said in an authoritative tone. “We’ve been after this one for weeks, she’s a crazy bitch. Move aside now. An ambulance is on its way.”

  We fell out of the pub into the bright daylight, he piled me into the tank and we made a speedy exit.

  “I thought we were meant to be making plans to rescue your boyfriend,” he exclaimed, “not shooting pub quizmasters for their ignorance of the names of Monkees records.”

  “The guy had had that comin’ all of his miserable fuckin’ life,” I explained.

  “I think,” said Stevens, with more than a hint of sarcasm, “I’m beginning to understand a little more about the inner you.”

  “You’ll never fuckin’ understand me,” I said defiantly.

  “Hmm,” he smirked, “for which I am truly thankful.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  SLIPPIN’ AWAY

  I took Even Stevens back to Jet Girl’s house and I went to bed. I had a fever coming on, some microscopic bug had caught me unawares. I was worried about Booga and all that, but it was his own stupid fault if he wanted to go and stick his head right in the lion’s mouth. His rescue would have to wait until I felt a bit better.

  Stevens seemed to fit right in with the guys; I suspected that Jet Girl had a little crush on him, she kept acting all spazzy and uncool when he was in the room. I left them to it and collapsed under a heap of tangled blankets on Jet Girl’s enormous four-poster.

  I slept soundly for eighteen hours and woke up very early the next morning, just as the sun was coming up. There was nobody else around, so I made myself a cup of char, wrapped myself up in a duvet, and went out to sit on the sunny end of the porch.

  I could tell that it was going to be a sweet day, everything was quiet and perfect. A honey bee landed on my bedding, mistaking one of the yellow-on-green polka dots for a nice juicy flower. He came up real close to my face, struggling to extract some pollen from my stinky old duvet. Then he gave up. I watched as he rubbed his little legs together and prepared for take-off.

  At that moment I had something that could only be described as a revelation. It was as though a veil had been lifted. Things suddenly looked different.

  I’m gonna try and explain it to you here. I know you’re probably thinking, “Oh for fuck’s sake Tank Girl, drop all of the existential, evangelical, hippie hoo-har and get on with the fuckin’ death-wars and horrible splatty stuff.” But, if you cast your mind back a bit, you might remember that I’m trying to tell you the story of why I’ve got it in so bad for Chankers etc.

  This is all relevant shit, so sit tight, you might learn something.

  This is what I was thinking...

  I started off by wondering about cars. I mean, when I was a kid, cars were a lot chunkier, and not just in design, but in substance. Compare a popular Ford model of the 1930s with a recently produced Ford – notice how the metal shell is now thinner, how the dash is now made out of injection-moulded plastic instead of thick hardwood. The whole make-up of the car is more sparing of materials than it used to be.

  I know that the reasons for this are patently obvious –

  Modern techniques mean that we can manufacture products cheaper by using fewer materials.

  Dwindling resources inflate the cost of materials, necessitating the need to constantly improve on those techniques.

  It was the dwindling resources that I was dwelling upon. Every day there are more and more people relying on less and less. There are already vast stretches of green land reduced to dust bowls by greedy burger companies. Mutations, freaks and lunatics arise as we try to squeeze the final drops of life out of our poor, gagging planet with thoughtless scientific modifications. I had a cartoon picture in my head of mankind holding a fuckin’ huge syringe, sucking green, blue and brown blood out of a shrivelling Planet Earth.

  I could lose myself in a major rant here, but saving the planet from the grabbing hands of you fuckin’ losers is not the point that I’m trying to get at.

  Although, for those of you who are thinking, “Hey, Tank Girl, I used to be into saving the world, but that just ain’t in anymore, so get with the programme,” I would like to say, “Fuck you. The death of an entire planet has got nothing to do with your poxy, insecure world of fashion. It goes on. It was never ‘in’ in the first place, you fuckin’ weekend vegetarian. It hasn’t gone away because there is a different band at number one. It is still happening, despite the fact that your easily swayed mind has chosen a new haircut. So kiss my hairy crack and die. Your priorities may have changed, but mine are still exactly the fuckin’ same as they always were.”

  Where was I?

  Oh yeah...

  This is my point...

  EVERYTHING – just like the cars I described earlier – IS GETTING THINNER.

  Think about it.

  It’s fuckin’ true.

  There are fewer trees making oxygen and more people to breathe it, so the air is thinner.

  Models and sex symbols of bygone ages – from cherubic Renaissance nudies to Marilyn Monroe – have always been curvaceous, voluptuous and buxom. Now they are anorexoid stick people – slight of frame and thin on personality.

  Our once fertile ground has been farmed to oblivion; most of the food that comes out of it now is forced-on with fertilisers and bloated with water. It has hardly any taste and precious little nutritional value. Thinness once again
.

  Cigarette paper sure is a hell of a lot thinner than it used to be. We put a new tub into Jet Girl’s bathroom the other day and when we took the old one out we found an ancient pack of smokes stuck behind the water pipes. It was fascinating stuff, the cigarettes were really chunky and the paper was loads thicker than it is these days. Booga, the twit that he is, tried smoking one and it was so horrible that he vomited into Jet Girl’s new tub... which also made him thinner.

  Wood, plastic, metal – our supplies of everyday materials are running low. Manufacturers have got to ‘make it thin’ to stay in the game.

  Money has become so thin that you can’t even see it anymore – our coinage shrank and shrank until it vanished into cyberspace.

  I went to a restaurant the other day and they gave me a really thin helping of custard on my apple pie. I’m sure that I used to get more when I was a kid.

  The ozone layer is thinner, letting in more ultraviolet radiation, which bleaches out natural colour and makes everything look really wishy-washy, or thin.

  (Okay, so I might have made that last one up, but you get where I’m coming from.)

  I can’t remember them all right now, but there are literally hundreds of other examples of emerging thinness in our modern age. I’m sure that you’ve probably thought of some already.

  All of these thoughts rushed through my head like a stampeding herd of thought-cattle.

  Then it hit me.

  We are disappearing.

  There will be no Apocalypse, no Armageddon, no uprisings by starving Third World hordes. None of that.

  One day we will simply disappear.

  We will run out of the very stuff that gives us substance. We will have chucked it all away, buried it on a landfill site, washed it into the brown sea with the rest of our sewage.

  We will slip, imperceptibly, into a translucent state, freak out a bit, and then fade from existence.

  Fuckin’ bring it on.

  We deserve nothing more.

  Anyway, all of that brought on a profound change in my view of the world. Whoever it was that said, “We are all made of star-stuff,” well, I could totally see what they were talking about. It was like that bit in The Matrix when Neo starts to see everything as a green code (that’s green code, not green cross code).

  It was a vague notion, but it was very real.

  I guess a change had come and got me.

  Perhaps things would never be the same again.

  THIRTY-SIX

  ZULU DOBSON’S AMAZING

  SENSORY SATURATION TANK

  Zulu Dobson is the kind of guy to take a stupid idea and run with it. I told him about my revelation and he started to bubble over with inspiration and enthusiasm. The stuff about things getting thinner especially caught his imagination.

  “That’s just the most fuckin’ amazingly ridiculously brilliant idea I’ve ever heard!” he shouted.

  “Is it?” I said, knocked back by his terrific response. It may have been a revelation of sorts, but I didn’t think it was that earth-shattering.

  “Don’t you see?” he ranted. “Don’t you see the implications? Don’t you see the multitude of avenues and alleyways that we can take this down?”

  “Avenues?” I asked, dubiously.

  “Think on, girl... What you say is so correct. But it goes further than that – we always view history as though it was just like now, but with different clothes, different rules, different vocabularies, different cars...” Zulu was taking off. He was flailing around Jet Girl’s kitchen, flapping his arms and gesticulating with every extremity of his ropy body. You could almost see the static charge sparking from his electrified afro. “...But what we always fail to remember is that the very substance of the planet has changed. It changes every fuckin’ day, and it always has, since the dawn of civilisation, since the first people left their caves and decided to alter the shape of the world by cutting down trees, planting crops, and building cities. You are so damn right. The air is different. Colours are different. Smells, tastes, and all other sensations are different. The substance of the planet will never be the same as it is at this moment.”

  “You’ve lost me,” I said, bemused and bewildered by his dynamic outburst.

  “Okay, I can see that,” replied Zulu, simmering down a touch and stopping to inhale some oxygen. “I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do... I’m gonna conduct an experiment – it won’t hurt, but it’ll need your full cooperation.”

  “What do I have to do?” I asked.

  “It’s a secret,” he said with a knowing wink, “but I guarantee that when it’s finished, you will understand exactly what I’ve been harping on about. Deal?”

  I went along with it just for the hell – the guy had just built me a wizard new tank, after all. “Okay,” I said. “Deal. But don’t surprise me with it. I’m okay with secrets, but I fuckin’ hate surprises.”

  “Cool. I’m outta here,” he said, slowly trotting out the door like he was suppressing a hundred galloping horses’ worth of momentum.

  . . .

  “Pssst! Hey, kids.” Zulu Dobson was sticking his head around the kitchen door and grinning like a naughty schoolboy. “Come to the garage,” he whispered, “there’s something I’d like you to see.”

  It was about ten hours since Zulu had disappeared into the garage to construct his secret ‘experiment’. I’d seen him tip-toeing around the yard and heard him sneaking up the back stairs, but I thought I’d just leave him to it.

  So me, Jet Girl, Sub Girl, Even Stevens and Barney dutifully followed him to his makeshift laboratory.

  Inside we were confronted by a ludicrous amalgamation of junk, drink, food, a dentist’s chair and some old-school technological equipment.

  “Wow, dude,” said Barney, “that’s amazing. But what the fuck is it?”

  “That’s easy,” replied Jet Girl. “It’s obviously a... er...”

  We all walked around Zulu’s surreal construction, poking it tentatively like it was a museum exhibit and flashing each other quizzical glances.

  “...Okay,” surrendered Jet Girl, “I give up. What the fuck is it?”

  “This,” said Dobson, proudly patting the chair at the centre of the thing, “is the world’s first Sensory Saturation Tank.”

  “Immense saturated fat tank?” asked Barney, confused as all-hell.

  “Sensory Saturation Tank,” repeated Dobson in a matter-of-fact tone. “You all know what a sensory deprivation tank is, right?”

  “Well I’ve just been deprived of my tank,” I said angrily, “and I didn’t like that one little bit.”

  “This is kind of different from that sort of thing,” explained Dobson. “Allow me to fill you in... Sensory deprivation was a process developed by one Dr. John Lilly in the 1950s; floating naked in an enclosed tank, severed from external stimulation, the subject’s brain would eventually begin to hallucinate. Lilly used this method to explore different levels of consciousness. Maybe you’ve seen the movie Altered Images? Nowadays a milder version of the same method is employed as a tool for stress and tension management. Cool?”

  “Cool,” we all replied in a chorus. I was listening intently, I couldn’t vouch for the others.

  “Sensory saturation,” continued Dobson in his intense, scientific fashion, “is a process invented by my good self in this very garage. Here the emphasis is on overload; the subject is seated in this sturdy but comfortable dentist’s chair and all of the senses are bombarded with blasts from the past. For instance, in the first experiment that I have just carried out on myself, I used the following stimuli:

  SMELL – after searching, unsuccessfully, for the classic school-time smell of boiled carrots – modern carrots failed to convey that certain sweetness that I remembered from the school dinner hall, even tinned baby ones that had been steeped in sugar/salt water – I stumbled upon a peculiar strain of mildew that only seems to grow on the cardboard used in cereal packaging. This, as I remembered it from a school project – a robo
t built from recycled food boxes that was left to go mouldy by a badly seeping window – was smelly enough to evoke an almost déjà vu flashback in my mind’s eye.

  TASTE – nothing could compete with my favourite childhood drink of R. White’s lemonade. Still tastes the same after all these years.

  SIGHT – with this black and white television set secured in front of me, so as to take up almost my entire field of vision – I’m sure that I, as most kids do, used to sit far too close to the TV – I ran episodes of Champion the Wonder Horse from a hidden VCR.

  SOUND – after trying several different songs and soundtracks through a pair of high-tech headphones, I realised that the problem wasn’t with my choice of music, but rather the quality of the equipment that I was listening to it on. An extensive search of local junk shops turned up a hand-held transistor radio – much like the one that had belonged to my mother, which she had given to me for after-dark, under-the-bedsheets listening. With this tranny tuned to a foreign station, I was able to listen to the out of focus, whirling sounds of long wave interference, backed with the distant chatter of some unintelligible foreign chap. Perfect.

  TOUCH – for this, I acquired a fake-fur granny hat from a charity shop, similar to the one that my Nan had sat on the end of her banister and I always mistook for a cat.

  EXTRASENSORY INTUITION – whether you believe in it or not, I had to take the sixth sense into consideration, just in case. I am still in contact with my childhood friend Simon, so I called him up and persuaded him to do some “thing” that we used to do as kids, in a street in a town nearby. Maybe, I thought, I would pick up on his vibe. After the experiment I learned that he’d been playing a solo game of knock-down-ginger, which is a rather selfish game of ringing someone’s doorbell and running away.

  Convinced of success, I dived enthusiastically into this initial experiment with my Sensory Saturation Tank.”

  “You,” I exclaimed in wide-eyed disbelief, “are fucking mental.”

  “Sure,” replied Dobson dismissively. “Anyway, to recap – I was sitting in this old dentist’s chair in this garage, drinking R. White’s lemonade, listening to long wave interference on an old transistor radio, watching Champion the Wonder Horse on a black and white TV, stroking a black furry hat and sniffing a mouldy piece of Cornflakes packet. Meanwhile my oldest friend knocked indiscriminately on front doors and legged it before anyone could answer.”