HERTZAN CHIMERA: ...the fucken tape has jammed with the cold. Where's my notepad?

MICHAEL A. ARNZEN: Don't worry about that, Chimfreak. There's no salvation anyway -- a few yards of tape ain't gonna save us. Where was I? Oh, yes...spewing nostalgia. When I was in junior high, I was really competitive with a kid down the block from me -- my old friend, Chris. We played tennis a lot on a nearby court -- and fancied ourselves as pros. He was like Bjorn Borg -- stoic and silent, with a serve that could kill you if you didn't get out of the way. I was the typical McEnroe/Connors/Nastase wannabe who whined and complained all the time, always throwing my racquet or cursing whenever a shot went out. Anyway, one time my buddy beat me pretty bad at match, and he laughed and I trounced home alone, throwing my racquet at various things all the way back: a tree, a stop sign, a car, a cat...anything that stood in my way. When I arrived home, I discovered I was locked out of the house. So -- purely out of rage, since I was riding an anger streak -- I punched the windowglass on the front door...and it shattered all around me. When I pulled my arm back, I gashed my wrist on a long, jagged shard, as pointy as an obscenely huge scalpel. The blood splurted out from an artery I didn't know I had -- it was so surreal -- it blurt in time with my heart and looked like something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I clutched it and walked politely up the sidewalk to my neighbourhood tennis pal's house and bled all over his front porch. His family freaked when they saw me standing outside of the front door -- pale and sallow -- spitting red stuff out of my arm. I guess I was in shock -- I distinctly remember not wanting to ring the doorbell and disturb my friend's sister, who was playing piano so nicely in the living room.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: This is untrue. You can't survive three hours in the arctic chill with your veins pulled open by fishhooks and your eyeballs sucked out by a sick twisted fuck of a lover....

MICHAEL A. ARNZEN: I survived, I tell ya! I survived. My Nikes didn't. I'd like to say that's the day I became a horror writer. But that's not true....

HERTZAN CHIMERA: You don't realise the pain you have put me through. Just to break through to this realm is a vast expense of my effort. Can't you even see how bright it is in here? How filled with horrors?

MICHAEL A. ARNZEN: I must have a thing for stringy things.
Which reminds me. I like playing guitar. Bass, electric, acoustic, whatever. If it strums, I like to mess with it. Of course, I'm no good. I'm ham-fisted and don't know how to read music, and the only chords I know are those learned from imitating Quiet Riot videos...you get the picture: bad. But it's fun.
A lot of readers don't know this about me, but I've actually been in a few garage bands that had live gigs. One group, a punk/blues/drinking song band called "The Gnarlers," had a coat hanger with a drop of blood dripping from its barb as our logo. We were a riot, with love songs like "Shuttle Love" (about a pair who go up in the shuttle and fall in love just before it blows up) and "You're Goin' To Jail" (about failing a urinalysis test on the job). We'd open our shows by playing Peter Gunn while the singer bounced onto the stage riding a hobby horse. No lie. Years later, I was in another band called "Abject," a metal band whose potty-mouthed hits included "Lance My Boil" and "Wipe Me." We would play gigs at dive bars and college parties and stuff. I helped write the lyrics in both bands and I gotta tell ya, there's nothing more rewarding than hearing a crowd chant obscenities at you along with a silly song you've written. One tune, "Black Lung Sonuvabitch" (inspired by the bad guy in the X-Files of all things) had a chorus that would go on for hours. And you don't want to know about the "dance" a patron at one bar got the crowd doing for our song, "Wipe Me." Oh my. Anyway, I say this is my hobby because I still try to figure out songs every now and then, and even write silly ones from time to time. But not for an audience anymore. Just for a lark. I think all people who write poetry have music in their heads, anyway --

HERTZAN CHIMERA: (pulls a mirror out of his winter-coat pocket) Here, look at yourself Mike, look at yourself and your surroundings. Get some perspective. How do you think you made it here into the arctic bowels of Hell?

Michael Arnzen looks around and he can now indeed see that he is in a rusting iron lung. His breathing is being done for him by four exasperated angels with torn wings and his mind is being worked by a copper-stained gargoyle with a gnarly hand crank. The old record would skip every now and then as the memories cowered away in dark corners afraid to reveal themselves.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Michael. Reveal your true self to us now, oh Black One. We are here to hear your confession. We are legion. We are your world.

MICHAEL A. ARNZEN: Snow slide, tyres squish into the grit and give way to sluice drift -- massive truck careens toward my frail clown car as I slide, petrified but bemused like an elderly drunk caught in a tight Spanish alley during the running of the bulls -- and as this bull on wheels blares its horn and leans toward me I see that its carriage bears the markings of a cruel joke -- "AUTO PARTS" -- the letter angling larger and larger before my gaping eyes and I beat my feet against the break pedal only to snap it impotent to the floor and though I should be clutching the wheel and trying to turn I let go and open my arms to embrace the wall of iron and glass crashing upon me --the steering wheel punches into my chest too fast for the airbag to inflate and so it pops open from inside my lungs and explodes air from within my shattered ribcage in a brightwhite explosion of pain that ruptures up through my windpipe toward my head, and for an instant I taste metal on the airburst....
and I awaken here, pain perpetual in this assemblage of parts, always already tortured by my own endless memories echoing recursive in the chambers of my mind -- and I long for not the stories, but the skips and crackles in this analogue memory loop. It's what's between the lines, what fizzles around the needle as it passes along its groove, that keeps me entertained as I churn out freak after freak from the factory of my mind.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: (covered in freakish litres of man joy) Ah, how that warms the old cockles of my heart, Mikey. Would you like me to show you the way out now?

MICHAEL A. ARNZEN: No. This is where I live, and breathe; this is all I know. That airbag is still billowing inside me, wetting the walls of this iron lung with its flimsy bloody tissue like some frail latex valve.
Besides, I've been doing this for years. I can never change the way I am and would never want to.
The copper gargoyle screeches and the needle jumps back on the record, landing in the centre and sliding across the label like a blade on ice. A mutant paw encrusted with chitinous canker scratches the sharp tip back onto the grooves with the surprising facility of a rap artist. The angels bleed from their stumps, Pythonesque.
I've been publishing horror for almost fifteen years now and the longer I keep this up, the more surprised I am that I can still surprise myself now and then. I live for that surprise. That's the whole reason I write to begin with -- to dive into the murky pool of my unconscious and see what artefacts I can drudge up to the surface. I like playing the "what if" game that writers have to play. Sometimes I pull my ideas out of the arse of pop culture. Like the movie Spiderman, based on the comics I grew up with. Now, armed with the adult sensibilities I've earned in living my life, I ask: What if there really was a creature half-man, half-spider? He'd be fantastic, of course, but not super-heroic and dedicated to save us non-mutants. He'd be tortured by his difference, corrupted by his bodily schism. It's out of that dark realism that poems like "Spiderboy" (from my collection, Freakcidents (http://www.darkvesperpublishing.com/) were born. Freaks suffer. But they also suffer the way we all do and they eventually get used to their suffering. They do grow into those strange bodies they inhabit, and they do learn to love their symptom. And maybe that's what's so scary about --
The record pops and skips.
A tortured mind is a revelation. I am inside you, a martyr of murder. I am twisting in your guts and I hold all the scissors.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: Is there no way I can coax you from your life of utter debauchery?

MICHAEL A. ARNZEN: The question is, can I ever coax you from a life of banality? That's one of my missions, my goals. I want to wake people up. It was pointed out to me once that many of my protagonists are boring, everyday schlubs. And I realized the truth of that -- that the characters I want my readers to identify with are much like themselves: regular folk surrounded by a world of insanity. They often confront the villains in my fiction who are often just self-righteous characters, people who take themselves too seriously, people who have rationalized evil in a way that makes perfect logical sense to themselves alone.

HERTZAN CHIMERA: (shivering now beyond control) Do you have one last request before I crawl out of this death pit and leave you to rot in your prison of ice and shit and distorted grimaces, bearded ladies and triple-breasted whores of Babylon?

MICHAEL A ARNZEN: Nah, you'll be back. I've still got a few of your parts, lingering here inside my machine. You never should have taken that truck-driving gig when you could have been writing fiction instead.
Wait -- I do have a request. Next time you return bring a friend and we'll see what kind of freakish assemblage we can make from the chipped fragments and mashed detritus of the three of us, eh, Hertzie? I'm getting tired of the same old --
The record pops and skips...and the nostalgic voice of Michael Arnzen mutates down to a warble and a drawl. The monkey screeches and chases Hertzan Chimera out of the gate and into the free air, where a black icestorm rains daggers of pain.