This Be The Verse
Fandom: Transmetropolitan
Written for: Apathy in the Yuletide 2007 Challenge
by kangeiko
Today, I am full of hate. It's unfortunate, as it is a clear three days before my deadline, so being full of so much bile it's seeping our of my joints means that my column might be delivered on time. This is clearly an unacceptable situation, and so I will be taking the opportunity to shoot drugs into my eyeballs. Fun drugs, not the useful brain-starter kind. I have already shot all the useful drugs I have into my brain, which is perhaps why this column will be almost on time.
My Filthy Assistants are also contributing to my motivation. They have secured an entire sackload of drugs and various unusually filthy pornos featuring both crocodiles and big fucking sticks, and have promised to share if I finish writing and stop throwing caribou eyes at their heads. They are clearly fools, for I shall wait until they have worn themselves out with their excessively noisy fucking and take all the drugs I want. The pornos, too.
They want to help with this column, I suspect. Withholding drugs from me is their way of showing love. Making me coffee is clearly an invitation to view my penis.
Yelena made me coffee this morning - briefly confusing me - having waited until Channon had gone off with a copy of 'Shag, Baby, Shag' and some pureed tiger-testicle lube to start up. "Channon likes her push-pistol," she said, like it's a big shock to me. Channon loves that push-pistol. She beat an old weredog prozzie half to death with it once, 'cause the bastard latched on to her leg and refused to let go. Which just goes to show that even an expensive three-dick hermaphrodite werebitch is a nuisance if you're in a hurry to pistol-whip the sitting President. To survive in the City, you've got to learn to eliminate inconveniences. My daddy said that to me the day after he dumped out the side of a moving vehicle and told me to fuck the fuck off.
"She shot a rapist with it, when she was twelve. In the testicles." She looked pained when she said it. Yelena has never been particularly dainty, what with the roach half-crawling out of her tequila and everything, but Channon doesn't get spooked easily, and if Channon gets spooked, Yelena gets spooked. As assistant traits go, inter-dependence is a pretty useless one.
I'm going to have to back up a little bit here, because it's not good journalistic sense to start in the middle of the story. Or maybe it is; my Editor seems keen to run extracts from each of my columns' centre paragraphs down the ad-boards in Century Square. So there are my words: not reporting the news, not telling the Truth, not even remotely current. Just words, out of context, blazing at the Beast and the Smiler and the bastards who shot Rita Severn. Always the big-name things, you'll notice, never the small-fry. There are no extracts from the columns on the anti-cancer trait farms, or the forced recruitment for the Soho reservation's empty slave-girl beds, or the torching of Angel 8. It's the large stuff, the big picture, the stuff that you fuckwits think will affect you in your cosy little world. Because, sure, it's sad that these things happen, but not sad enough that you're willing to do anything about it. It's not sad enough to stop you from switching to the Sex Puppets at breakfast time, or signing up your syphilis-ridden brood for some wholesome after-school activities with the Church of Tesla so you can fuck the neighbour's cat and drink all their gin.
I wrote a column a little while ago about the kiddie prostitutes out by K-Road. They were mostly care home kids. I think you liked that. Not the abuse bit - although given the way Right Love has been taking off, that wouldn't surprise me - but the care home bit. The drunken parents, and the scars on their backs, and the lawyers taking them out back for a quickie before handing them over to social services. Poor little things this woman said to me once, one hand on my arm and the other down my pants. She had a stupid hat on, and I was too busy watching it watch me to notice that she had my balls in her manicured grip. Poor little helpless things, and you're so good to try to help them, Spider...
It occurs to me, as I sit here and piss on the Christmas cards my Filthy Assistants have diligently written out for me and left out in the hope of obtaining my signature or DNA marker, that having my balls squeezed by a big-picture masochist is not quite the image I was going for to get those sympathy ducts working. They've started installing them gratis, I'm told, if you opt for the Home Dungeon! (tm) kit and Victim Bot combo. The hurt/comfort meme is still big business, these days, and we all know that torturing a little girl in your basement is just not as much fun if you don't have waves of sympathy-induced endorphins to crest in on.
Upset with that image? Tough shit. These things sell primarily to suburban homes - who actually have basements - and there is a 70% chance that there are at least three houses all kitted up on your street.
On average, I get ten letters per week that ask why I don't deal with more 'local' issues. Clearly, covering the Angel 8 riot is not local; nor are the K-Road kids or those in the recovery districts. What's local to me isn't local to my readers, as a good proportion of you idiot lemmings live in insta-houses in the City outskirts. You don't have to deal with the transients, with the necrophile policedogs and the trait-muggers that lurk on every City street corner, so why bother reading about them? Only when you're lonely; only when you want to feel better about yourselves. Only when you want to sit in your designer armchair with its luxury silk upholstery and drink shandy and jerk off, thinking about how lucky you are compared to everyone else.
That cop groping himself while he kicks an in-betweener in the ribs would be right at home on Maple Drive or Oak Avenue. The Right Love lobbyist with the friendly Minister buddy and his regular donations to the Church of Tesla would probably be invited to dinner. Because they're your kind of people, aren't they?
You make me sick.
So here is something to make you sick, just to make us even. Here's something to make you go downstairs and check on your Victim Bot, and rub yourself against the doorframe when you find your next-door neighbour 'borrowing' her over the workbench. You want me to write about 'local' news? This is as local as it gets.
*
I had my perfectly good erection ruined today when a pretty blonde girl, red lipstick smeared over her face, came up to me on the street and offered to suck my dick for an autograph. She was wearing go-go boots, a T-shirt with a post-redereconstructionist slogan - "my depression is the world's fault, and there's a banjo playing a sad tune in Kentucky to prove it" - and carried a bag full of condoms, dildos and a variety of other sex aids. She couldn't have been more than ten years old.
Goddamnit. And it was a good erection, too. No pus or anything.
You know the kind of girl I'm talking about: the one with the pretty hair, and the too-short skirt that's always the most popular one in school. And they don't ever look upset, really, because somehow we've managed to convince them that they're leading a good life. That they're luckier than the rest.
My Filthy Assistants hate them and everything they stand for. That little girl's lucky that she didn't ask them first, otherwise she'd be taking her nose home in a hanky and her bowels home in a bucket. Channon, my very own personal stripper who refuses to strip and instead threatens to razor-line my underwear, thinks that they're poor little rich girls; the inevitable discards of the middle class.
"There isn't anything wrong with then," she says slowly, drinking the last of my non-toxic beer. "They're not abused, underfed or abandoned by society. They go to posh schools where the teachers still have most of their limbs, they can eat as many baby seal eyes and pig-sticks as they like. They can have cat-skin slippers delivered by the dozen."
The cat growls warningly at this. I don't think she likes Channon much.
"There's no reason for it."
My other Filthy Assistant - the one who will occasionally fuck me if I ask nicely - agrees. Which is a frightening thought in itself. See, Yelena is one of those favoured middle-class kids. Or used to be, at any rate.
"I didn't trade favours for slips," she argues, stealing my smokes. Bitch. "But I was with that crowd, yeah. It was fashion suicide not to be."
Yelena's list of the causes of fashion suicide include the wrong schools, the wrong clothes, the wrong parents, the wrong zipcode, the wrong opinions on crucial world events such as whether the Sex Puppets will tour or if pig-sticks are fattening without overdosing on no-calorie traits, and what colour the Press Secretary's panties are today (SPKF are doing a feature this evening). Yelena's from Old Heath Road, and I know her father - who doesn't seem to be a complete shithead - so I am vaguely surprised.
"That's the point. There's nothing wrong with them."
"And they still turn out crappy." Channon must be very pissed off about this, because she volunteers to make another monkey burger run.
By mid-afternoon, she's pissed off with a sub-standard porno, and Yelena is chain-smoking and flipping through the feeds. She starts in on Channon's push-pistol, and it takes a while for her to get to the point of the story. Not sure there is a point, actually; she just peters off after a while. "She says she's horrified about it now," she said. The all-live sex feed is covering a woman who broke the world record for most pig-sticks eaten in a minute while jerking off a horse/husky crossbreed. There's an anti-hunger trait ad running as a footer.
"But not back when she did it?" I light up a smoke; inhale.
"No. It was easy back then. When she was young. Normal-like. Like it was for me, I suppose."
I can say nothing to that. My Assistants, filthy as they are, are a good few years younger than I am, and remember things a little more clearly.
See, these kids aren't the ones on K Road, but that makes no difference. They wear the same caked make-up and want the same things and adults fuss over them, either to help them or screw them, and they all walk through their lives, zombified. It's easy to see how badly we're failing the homes kids, and to coo sympathy over the feeds and take them to one side for 'business'. It's easy when they're the brats of drug addicts and prozzies and transients and you figure they can earn enough to pay for their drugs by doing a couple of johns a night. Where's the harm, right? They're so dead about the eyes, they're closer to the pig-meat farm than they are to humanity.
The trouble is, those dead-eyed kids aren't doing it for the drugs. They're not doing for the money, or the independence, any more than little Sammy-Jo is offering to suck me off for my signature. They fuck you up, your mum and dad, a revival friend of mine told me a while back, and she's right, as usual.
There are a bunch of shrinks over by South David Street Clinic who spend their time paying pre-teens obscene amounts of money to have their brainwaves recorded. They have an impressive database built up, and they've covered the poorest and the richest kids from all parts of the City. They like to be thorough, do neurologists, and already have a few results.
As far as they can tell, there's a drop-off in brainwave activity in certain parts of the brain between the ages of 5 - 15. The comatose stage, they've taken to calling it, the walking zombie, could fuck them and they wouldn't notice, already dead inside stage.
You know. The stage formerly known as 'childhood'.
They haven't come up with a reason yet, and I'm somehow doubtful that they will. That would involve a mirror, and a long, hard look. And they - like myself, like the rest of the City's population - are spending the day watching TV instead. They don't mean to, but they do.
Dear readers, please fuck off and die.
Today, I am staying indoors to escape my pre-teen zombie groupies.
Expect the meme soon.
*
fin
*
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
*
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
*
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
- This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin