Shock Totem 8: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  CG: I still live deep in Lovecraft country, and I like writing CAS pastiches and cheesy pulp adventure à la REH. But my “real” style, the voice in my head, came from studying cyberpunk writers like Gibson and Shirley and Rucker and maximalists like Pynchon and DeLillo. The morality in my stories, too, I draw more from science fiction than from horror. Good and evil are not just unrealistic, they’re lazy.

  I’ve been reading more crime lately...not so much to write it as to pick up some skills at economizing. Everyone knows, or think they know, what they’re getting into with a crime story, so you’re freed from a lot of exposition. Bringing more of that into horror would be a great gift to a genre that still believes people want epic, heavily padded novels.

  I grew up thinking I was going to write films, but undergraduate school in LA in the period when all the studios were being taken over and restructured as vertically integrated corporations cured me of that. But film still informs my work more than it should. My favorite movies all came out in the summer of ‘82. I love Cronenberg and took more than just ideas from his films; his genius for articulating visceral obsession is something I’ve tried to reproduce in my own work.

  The speed and immediacy of film made horror exciting again when the splatterpunks brought it back to the page, but it also left behind a lot of the techniques that make prose more psychologically powerful even than film. I’m slowly trying to inject more sensory data than just sight and sound into my writing and to make it feel more like writing, or a transparent dream, and less like a treatment for an unfilmable film.

  JB: See, I knew there had to be enormous Cronenberg influence on you. Do you read a lot? How important is what you read and its shading of what you write? There is heavy political allegory in quite a bit of your work. Do you follow the goings on in the political arena? That shit is far more terrifying these days than anything a writer could conjure up.

  CG: I read constantly but slowly, and I do absorb tone from everything I read. Rather than cut myself off, I read the kind of things that exemplify the kind of voice I’m going for. I’m doing a horror crime book right now, so I’ve been reading a lot of noir and crime stuff; but I’m also doing a comic book about artificial meat, so I have to freebase mass quantities of hideous anecdotes about industrial slaughterhouses. Weird random things I throw in usually percolate up in some unpredictable way.

  I follow politics avidly, and use it to get pissed off every morning, but rather than go out looking for Facebook fights, I try to channel that anger back into my writing. I don’t feel the need to lay down my political beliefs in public and alienate half my audience, when I could potentially get them to pay me to challenge everything they believe in a novel. Before I even followed politics, I read Ellison’s Gentleman Junkie, and it made me seethe about racism and anti-Semitism and payola in rock radio, and I realized this was a way of pumping out your anger like venom from a wound, and then selling the stuff.

  JB: How much and where does music fit in with your creative process? I recall the answer to an interview I read with you a few years ago, where you were asked about going back in time to be a roadie for anyone. You had mentioned Skinny Puppy, Ministry, and Metallica in your answer...and my heart warmed. We love music at Shock Totem, all sorts of styles...so wow us with your digs!

  CG: I love music at least as much as I love writing, and more often, I feel it loves me back. I use it to stay inside a story for as long as possible, and when I’m burned out on words, I go poke out some half-assed homebrew techno and it restores my faith in the mysteries of the creative process. All too much about writing is deliberate for me, but composing anything is an experiment, because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

  I listen to almost everything that has no vocals in it. I used to audit alternative rock radio for ten years, identifying artists and song titles, and so I got burned out on rock and fed up with singing and lyrics. It’s always a story or a voice that plugs you into a situation or an emotional state, where instrumental music opens up the mind and lets you explore your own stories.

  I’ve always loved industrial but as my arteries have hardened I’ve drifted more towards dub, vintage exotica and ambient electronica. My favorite spins while I’m writing these days are Amon Tobin, Broken Note, Shpongle, Ott, Mauxuam, Martin Denny, Secret Chiefs 3, the Orb, and lots of spy music on Soma.fm. In the car this summer, I’ve been playing Queens of the Stone Age, Mr. Bungle, Ratatat, Grimes, Wall of Voodoo, Yeasayer, and Major Lazer, but when I’m stuck in traffic I crank up whatever’s on the classical station and make O-faces at strangers until they let me cut them off.

  I once got to interview John Balance from Coil, one of my favorite groups, and one that felt somehow uniquely mine because I’d only ever met a handful of people who’d ever heard of them. Their stuff is sinister beyond all reason; they did a soundtrack for Hellraiser that was deemed too creepy to use in the film. Anyway, I asked him about the bizarre subjects for their songs and how they evoke such a pervasively weird and malevolent atmosphere on tape. I thought I was paying him a compliment, but he just sighed and said, “We’re not trying to be strange. We’re just trying to communicate sincerely about the things that we love.”

  And ever since then, that’s all I’ve ever tried to do, too.

  JB: That’s actually a pretty good standard to go by. What is coming up on the Goodfellow horizon? New collaborativeness with Skipp? Film? Taxidermied sculpture?

  CG: I’m trying to fight my way back to the next novel, but the short story work I would’ve loved to have ten years ago is burying me. Skipp and I are slated to take on a major genre nonfiction project next year, and hopefully my next novel, Repo Shark, will be out from Swallowdown in time for Xmas. It’s about a repo man who goes to Hawaii to take a vintage Harley back from a were-shark.

  JB: Holy hell! That sounds great! I’d like to thank you for chatting with me. As I said I am a big fan of your work, and one of the coolest things Shock Totem has afforded me, is the chance to chat with people I dig and who have inspired me. Any final outbursts or remarks before we adjourn?

  CG: Sure...

  When I was researching the meatpacking industry, I learned that chickens, who are prone to cannibalism anyway, will often set upon each other with a vengeance when they’re packed up on the truck bound for the slaughterhouse, many even after they’ve been debeaked. Now, as I so often do when I come across some startling truth about the animal kingdom, I reflexively pictured human beings doing the same thing. And in this case, I couldn’t imagine humans pecking each other to death even as they’re all being carted off to a plucking and certain doom...not until the next time I clicked over to Facebook.

  Much as it delights me to see so many of my peers frolicking in the tar pits of social media and thinking they’re being writers, it drives me up the fucking wall to see so much energy wasted in miscommunication, in outrage orgies and petty arguments that seem to scratch the creative itch for so many self-professed artists. Half of it is assholes flying their asshole flag and professing shock to discover they’re being called on it. But fewer and fewer of even the slender percentage of reasonable people out there seem to grasp the differences between fact and opinion, between criticism and hatred and censorship.

  I see amateurs and semi-pros shouting past each other, thinking they’re debating when they’re just beating crudely assembled straw men. I more or less withdrew from social media when every argument ended up detouring into willful misunderstanding and having to clarify and repeat just what you’d said and why. As a writer, your art is effective communication. The foundation of the craft is leaving no wiggle room for interpretation of what you set down.

  Some of it is the decline of logic itself, but a lot more of it is people are angry because they believe they’ve done all the work and the audiences they’ve been told to expect just aren’t showing up; or the audience that shows up is just there to sell their own books... and it’s somehow not enough to have the gift of being able to express someth
ing in words that someone else will pay for, if someone else is making a living at it.

  Now more than ever, nobody’s getting the kind of validation they need from this thing of ours, but even people who try to jokingly redefine what professionalism means to include these strugglers on the margins who sincerely are trying to say something in a compelling, entertaining, artful way are getting shit on, because the fighting...

  I think even the fighting with other writers is less frightening than the silence and the solitude of actually writing. I think a lot of the noise cluttering up the social scenes of the various genre ghettos is the end product of people being afraid to be alone with their own heads. You can’t entertain yourself so you close your work in progress and go over to Facebook and Holy shit, can you believe what that idiot said? And even the ugliest scene one can get embroiled in is going to be easier than facing that you just can’t entertain yourself, so how can you expect to entertain anyone else?

  When William Lee offers someone his old typewriter in Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, he says it produces several different types of hallucinogenic substance when it likes what you’ve written, he wasn’t talking about a typewriter or even drugs. He was talking about his brain. I think I’m only able to get more written on the page than on blogs or Facebook, to write instead of being a writer, because I genuinely enjoy the solitude. I live to entertain myself. And I’m blessed with a brain with an easily jimmied medicine chest.

  JB: That is actually fairly spot on. There is a reason I rarely engage in anything deeper than a plug for Shock Totem-related things or my own writing and music videos. Opinions are wielded like nail-studded baseball bats...and no one gets it when you try to bring that to light. I’ll leave this as it stands. Thanks again.

  CG: Thanks, this was a lot of fun!

  THE BARHAM OFFRAMP PLAYHOUSE

  by Cody Goodfellow

  When everybody stops showing up to an acting class in Hollywood, it’s for one of three reasons. A new and edgier method group has sprung up; a big in-town feature is casting extras; or Randy Hurlburt killed the vibe one too many times, and everyone bailed.

  Though he’d be the first to admit he was kind of slow, Randy was not totally oblivious to this phenomenon. Even if he couldn’t acknowledge it, he knew at some bone-deep level that he sucked the life out of a room. So when he ran into three of the old NoHo Free Theater improv gang at the El Coyote, he played it cool. He’d already hit two workshops this week that had mysteriously vaporized.

  He knew something was wrong when one of them spotted him and called him over. “Hey, look, Randy’s here!” Jerry Aziz’s laugh sounded like cheap breakaway glass. “Now it’s a party, right?” The other three in the booth stared lazy daggers at him, but they scooted over.

  Sheila had been around since long before Randy came to town, and she was Randy’s first celebrity acquaintance; he recognized her from the old Clapper ads. Even for Hollywood, she was a mean person. Tammy was a second-string porn starlet, but heeded the call to pursue legitimate acting when her triple-D implants ruptured. Nodules of free-floating silicone still swam around loose under her skin. Colin was allegedly a certified Lee Strasberg instructor, but he couldn’t hold a class together. He kept going to workshops to harass other acting coaches and pick up on younger, dumber men.

  Jerry was a dental hygienist. He had twice played dentists on TV shows nobody saw, and once, in a bold reach, he’d played a pharmacist with one line on one of those shows on TNT with all the swears.

  “Hey, you guys,” Randy mumbled, trying to low-ball their apathy. Each was nursing a birdbath-sized pomegranate margarita. He started to tell them about his day, his week, his larger strategy, but they closed up. They didn’t even laugh at his report on the student zombie film in which he was an extra. They charged him eighty bucks to be in it, even though he did his own makeup.

  “That’s awesome, Randy,” Colin said, “but the grownups are still talking.” He sucked his electric cigarette until the little LED cherry made like a red strobe. “You’re not going down there, Jerry. It’s fucking suicide. Literally and socially.”

  “You’re just scared because it’s real!” Aziz shouted, looking around the cantina, but the waitresses were old hands at ignoring hammy scenes. “I’m going. You poseurs can come with me and try something real, or at least come support me, or you can all fuck off.”

  “You’re not going through with it,” Tammy pouted. Her upper lip plumped like a burst bicycle tire. “And you don’t have the physicality for it. Not for any of the really real parts—”

  “You know about it?” Colin banged his fake cig on the table. “Does every loser in the Valley know about it?”

  “What’re you guys talking about?” Randy asked, but he was sure they wouldn’t tell him.

  Something real.

  Tomorrow, whatever it was would be all the rage, and everyone would be talking about it, trying to cop a feel off it until they smothered it.

  They all just looked at him like he was made out of bugs. Even Aziz regretted calling him over. “We’re talking about going...somewhere new,” he mumbled.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Colin said. His voice went up an octave like a slutty coed in a slasher movie.

  “I want to go,” Randy said, totally swept away in the moment. He’d only come in looking for leads on audition call-ups or to fish for some positive reinforcement to get back into workshops. “I want to try out, too, man, for...whatever.”

  Aziz looked around the table. Sheila and Tammy were studiously texting each other. Colin shook his head and called for the check.

  “Fine,” Jerry said, “fuck you all very much. I’ll just go with Randy, then.”

  He turned to Randy and grabbed the bigger man’s biceps to yank him down until they almost knocked heads as he towed him out of El Coyote. “You want to come with me, then all you have to do is shut the fuck up. We’re not going to a class or a workshop or an audition. Where we’re going, I’m not going to try to explain right here, but it needs an audience, so you can come. And if you’re not too careful, you might just learn everything there is to know about acting, tonight.”

  • • •

  Randy believed he already knew everything there was to acting, and it hadn’t helped. He’d been knocking around Hollywood for almost eleven years. He knew everybody who wasn’t making it. And from Day One, people had been telling him to shut the fuck up and listen.

  As a serious actor, he knew you had to make a constant study of people. You had to shut up and listen, observe and learn to get inside their heads and hearts. It was a difficult discipline to master, but in ten years of listening, Randy had heard almost nothing but other actors talking about acting.

  When he first dropped out of high school and came out from Tucson, Randy had hit every audition with vigor and panache, left everyone remembering his name. He had been summoned into the limelight with a born-again ferocity, and went everywhere to spread the gospel of himself. The casting agents called him Randy The Barbarian, goofed on him and made small talk with him like old classmates, but they never, ever gave him work. He had “boundless enthusiasm and a distinctive, goonish, look,” but he needed polish. They all had friends who ran excellent acting workshops.

  But the heavenly limelight that bewitched him had proved to be a bug zapper. He had accumulated forty-eight extra roles on various basic cable cop shows, and been dropped by almost as many agents. He had a trunk full of costumes that he donned to pose for pictures in front of the Mann Chinese at the end of the month to make rent on his studio in North Hollywood. None of the costumes fit anymore, and now he and his arthritic Great Dane, Conan, lived in his van.

  Somewhere along the line, it had stopped being anything like fun or even a way to earn a living, and had become a religion. He had dedicated his life to the Big Break, and so It Must Come. What else was he wired for?

  At least he wasn’t alone, even if it always felt that way. Aziz barely talked to him as they drove north up C
ahuenga. The major boulevard turned into a two-lane game trail squashed against the crumbling sandstone cliffs by the mighty concrete anaconda of the 101. The eight-lane freeway was choking on its dinner, and they blew by the traffic on the frontage road.

  “Come on, Jerry, baconberryfatsofairy,” Randy needled. “Where we going?”

  Aziz bit his lip, working out his motivation. “What did you want, when you first came to this town, Randy?”

  “Shit, man, I want—”

  “To be famous? Rich? Powerful? Loved?”

  “All of the above, dude...”

  “No. What did you need, to feel complete?”

  Randy picked up Aziz’s cue that this was a serious question, and not a rhetorical one. He’d heard this kind of stuff before from frustrated actors. This was the kingdom of dreams, and a dream was a wish, not a promise.

  “Jerry my brother,” he began a hell of a soliloquy...

  Aziz cut him off. “I just wanted to be somebody else, you know? Anybody else...”

  Someone swerved in front of them, cutting them off without realizing they were there, and Aziz waved his hand, grateful for the illustration. “This city is a sinkhole of selfishness. Every negative has a positive, right? You’d think there must be a city on the exact opposite of the globe from LA, where nobody ever lies, and the ideal is total negation of the self, where everyone looks after everyone else...”

  And everybody stands on their heads and eats shit and poops bread, right? They’re still humans, so they probably fall all over themselves trying to have nothing at all, and they’re still not happy. All of this came into Randy’s head too fast to make it out of his mouth, so he just said, “We are on the other side of the world from LA. Welcome to the Valley.”