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going nowhere fast - excerpt...
Roth was the heaviest and the healthiest, the alpha-male who enforced his authority with a hacksaw and an improvised knuckleduster made from a strip of wood and some nails. Ford maintained the rat farm in the trunk of the car, a sealed box full of inbred, half-blind vermin that supplemented their meagre protein intake. Sandra bartered with passing Walkers, sucking them off through the passenger window in return for lumps of coal, root vegetables or small pieces of dried meat. It had been Roth's idea to remove her remaining teeth.
A small section of the floor had rusted away, so Adams dumped the rat shit and the human faeces down below into a makeshift compost-box he had created in the space between their car and the vehicle below them. A colony of fat white worms, beetles and albino cockroaches had taken up residence and they would eat these along with the pale toadstools and polypores that occasionally emerged from the dark morass of sump-oil and shit.
kek-W speaks...
Stories: where do they come from?
To be honest, nothing galvanises me quite like a deadline. Without some sort of finish-line, self-imposed or otherwise, I lack the focus to fully complete anything. Mike Philbin's end-of-month deadline was already looming when I spotted he was accepting submissions for Chimeraworld #4, so "Going Nowhere Fast" wound up being written fairly quickly over three evenings. I used a CD-r of disturbingly off-kilter homemade sonics provided by my friend Mic (who I collaborate with as Ice Bird Spiral) to help me soak up some atmosphere, then sat back while the story pretty much wrote itself.
Later, I stepped back from the wreckage with a strong sense that what I'd written was about something, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what. I have a non-specific dislike of car culture in general and a smouldering contempt for brand-obsessives whose lives are defined by the chassis-size of the vehicle they drive. And since I'm prone to procrastinate on an almost daily basis about gas-guzzling carbon-fascisti jeep-owning morons, I figured the story was just a lame excuse for me to embed my own eco-bigotry inside some whacked-out imagery.
I think the idea of a group of people cohabiting inside a vehicle may have been inspired by the song "Live in a Car" by The UK Subs. The idea of a hierarchy within the car hinted at class divides and the Daily Mail driven aspirational culture that blights our country. The closed ecosystem with its diminishing resources was probably some ham-fisted subconscious comment on Gaia style eco-politics, while the fact that the various characters consciously choose to stay within their vehicles (and slowly die) rather than get out and walk in the world outside seemed to echo society's dependency on the car. The snow, I assumed, was merely a reference to global warming, etc, etc.
Yeah, okay, I can buy that. So far, so good.
It wasn't until this morning when I lay in bed, half awake, thinking about what I was going to write for this piece when I suddenly started to question why it really was that I didn't like cars. And the answer came to me suddenly and unbidden, just like the story.
My late father had been a mechanical engineer all his life ever since he started working in a garage at the age of 14 back in the late 1930s. He joined the army when WW2 broke out and spent 6 years with the Royal Engineers in North Africa learning to fix just about anything that had an engine. When I was a child, he had his own motor accessory shop, plus a small garage space nearby where he would repair cars in the evening. His ability to fix engines was near-legendary in our town, and so people would bring their cars to him from far and wide: he mended stuff, just like the protagonist in the story…
I was a dreamy child who had his head permanently stuck inside a Marvel comic, unlike my father, who was a practical chap, but outwardly awkward with all that unmanly, emotional stuff. Bless him, he did his best to bond with me: he would try and get me to help him in his workshop, but I hated every moment of it. You'd think I'd be glad of my father's time, but I think I had a sense (mistaken, I realise now) that perhaps he loved the cars more than he loved me and I'd always be second best to them. After all, repairing engines was what he did; it seemed to define him, to complete him as a person. How could I compete with that? So I didn't bother. Instead, I retreated further into the comics and, later on, the books…occasionally surfacing to sense his obvious disappointment that I did not share his passion for cars. For years, our relationship drifted into a curious limbo state while we tried and failed to find some common ground.
Dad tried hard to reach me: he took me fishing and to the cinema; taught me to swim and got me drunk on homebrew. He was a good father, but I just didn't realise it at the time.
He lost both of his legs to diabetes and was wheelchair-bound during his twilight years. Cars were his life and it hit him extremely hard when his disability prevented him from tinkering with engines. As his health slowly failed, he would sometimes fall out of bed at night and was forced to crawl in the dark to the phone to ring for help, an image that now seems grotesquely poignant when I re-read the section where one of the characters is forced to leave his car, but is no longer able to stand or support his own weight.
My sister and I were both there when he died. Dad's death was shockingly and unexpectedly violent, considering that he was weak and bed-ridden. He seemed possessed by one final wave of manic vitality and fought all night to hold onto his life, thrashing around, wriggling and squirming, almost in panic, as if he was forcing his way through a tunnel or some narrow, confined space. He snarled and hissed at some unseen nemesis. I have never seen anyone fight so long and hard…he did not go quietly into the night.
Towards the end, he clenched both his fists and held them up in the air, as if he was gripping something tightly…a gesture that must have haunted me far more than I thought, for I have just this moment realised that I unconsciously used that very same image in this story. I always assumed dad was fighting off some invisible enemy in his final moments, but I now realise that he was driving…
Gaaah. (Wipes away tear). Jeez: writing for Mike Philbin is like going into therapy (but a fuckuva lot cheaper).
Stories, eh? Where do they come from?
http://kidshirt.blogspot.com/
http://www.myspace.com/kidshirt
kek-W bio...
Landlocked in the dark mythic heart of England's West County, Kek-W is Somerset's own twisted Renaissance Man. A music critic and alt.culture obsessive, he writes polemic ephemera for magazines like FACT and Dazed & Confused. He also paints, DJs, makes 8mm animated films and writes deviant SF pulp-fiction, as well as comic-scripts for 2000AD. He creates deranged electronic music and blogs under the alias Kid Shirt at Kidshirt.blogspot.com. His latest project is an album of psychedelic noise for Australian label MYMWLY as a member of the Ice Bird Spiral collective.
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Chimericana Books.
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Chimericana Books.
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