Minds-I-Book

I finished writing The Life of Henry Fuckit almost 20 years ago. Two publishers rejected the manuscript, and I was left feeling humiliated and seriously wounded. After a while it occurred to me that the gatekeepers were too dumb to appreciate henry, and what was needed was something for them to look at instead of just reading a whole lot of text that was beyond them.

I commissioned a young graphic artist to draw 50 pictures based on incidents in the story. It was then that I thought of inviting all and sundry to join the illustrative process, and the Minds-I-Book project got underway. With the assistance of my daughter and son a website was designed and saw the light of day in 2014. Unfortunately, the project never took off and, discouraged, I added it to my list of failed enterprises.

The website remains open for inspection, and anyone wishing to contribute to the gallery is still welcome to do so. The Minds-I-Book can be found here. 

To view my longer pieces, you can find me on Smashwords here.

Pat’s Story by JM Synge

I chanced upon this story a long time ago while I was pretending to study for a B.A. at the University of Cape Town. It immediately appealed to me because it was so improbable it could only have been related as factual by a narrator who derived ironic pleasure from testing the credulity of his audience.  

Here is the story, which was recorded by Synge on a visit to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland around 1900.

One day I was travelling on foot from Galway to Dublin, and the darkness came on me and I ten miles from the town I was wanting to pass the night in. Then a hard rain began to fall and I was tired walking, so when I saw a sort of a house with no roof on it up against the road, I got in the way the walls would give me shelter.

As I was looking round I saw a light in some trees two perches off, and thinking any sort of a house would be better than where I was, I got over a wall and went up to the house to look in at the window.

I saw a dead man laid on a table, and candles lighted, and a woman watching him. I was frightened when I saw him, but it was raining hard, and I said to myself, if he was dead he couldn't hurt me. Then I knocked on the door and the woman came and opened it.

'Good evening, ma'am,' says I.

'Good evening kindly, stranger,' says she, 'Come in out of the rain.' Then she took me in and told me her husband was after dying on her, and she was watching him that night.

'But it's thirsty you'll be, stranger,' says she, 'Come into the parlour.' Then she took me into the parlour—and it was a fine clean house—and she put a cup, with a saucer under it, on the table before me with fine sugar and bread.

When I'd had a cup of tea I went back into the kitchen where the dead man was lying, and she gave me a fine new pipe off the table with a drop of spirits.

'Stranger,' says she, 'would you be afeard to be alone with himself?'

'Not a bit in the world, ma'am,' says I; 'he that's dead can do no hurt,' Then she said she wanted to go over and tell the neighbours the way her husband was after dying on her, and she went out and locked the door behind her.

I smoked one pipe, and I leaned out and took another off the table. I was smoking it with my hand on the back of my chair—the way you are yourself this minute, God bless you—and I looking on the dead man, when he opened his eyes as wide as myself and looked at me.

'Don't be afraid, stranger,' said the dead man; 'I'm not dead at all in the world. Come here and help me up and I'll tell you all about it.'

Well, I went up and took the sheet off of him, and I saw that he had a fine clean shirt on his body, and fine flannel drawers.

He sat up then, and says he—

'I've got a bad wife, stranger, and I let on to be dead the way I'd catch her goings on.'

Then he got two fine sticks he had to keep down his wife, and he put them at each side of his body, and he laid himself out again as if he was dead.

In half an hour his wife came back and a young man along with her. Well, she gave him his tea, and she told him he was tired, and he would do right to go and lie down in the bedroom.

The young man went in and the woman sat down to watch by the dead man. A while after she got up and 'Stranger,' says she, 'I'm going in to get the candle out of the room; I'm thinking the young man will be asleep by this time.' She went into the bedroom, but the divil a bit of her came back.

Then the dead man got up, and he took one stick, and he gave the other to myself. We went in and saw them lying together with her head on his arm.

The dead man hit him a blow with the stick so that the blood out of him leapt up and hit the gallery.

That is my story.

In The Life of Henry Fuckit, Henry has a conversation with Harry Bergson in which the telling of tall stories is touched upon.

“My whole life became a sham. After a few years I had become a compulsive liar, a pathological confabulator. At first it started as humorous exaggeration, light-hearted tall stories told for the sake of entertainment. Then I began to see these creations in my mind as a way of impressing and manipulating. I began to lose track of what I had said to whom. I even began to believe some of my own embellishments and fabrications."

"What kind of things did you lie about?" As an inveterate manipulator of reality himself, Henry was curious to hear more about someone else's ability to invent.

"Oh, at first, it was pretty harmless stuff. It was more like boastfulness than downright mendacity. My sporting and academic achievements, progress at work, sexual prowess - that sort of thing."

Henry was not impressed. "Sounds as if you were a bullshitter. Plenty of those around. On a far more creative level is the teller of tall stories. You tell a story that is fantastic or exaggerated but almost plausible. The skill is in placing it just beyond the bounds of logic, so that an intelligent listener is able to pick up the clue that makes the story nonsense or an impossibility. The drawback comes when you have an audience too stupid to get it. You find yourself faced with an irritating dilemma - do you allow them to swallow the crap you've been dishing up, and thereby turn yourself into a cheap liar, or do you labour on, heaping one absurdity upon another until they finally see what you're up to, and in the process turn subtlety and wit into coarse buffoonery?"

The full exchange can be read on my website here.

To view my longer pieces, you can find me on Smashwords here.

Beyond Belief

 

(Painting by Walter Meyer)

 

This uncle of mine, the one who died of a heart attack on the toilet, once told me a story that really grabbed me and stayed in my memory and sat there festering in my imagination like some parasite trying to make an illegal connection to the synaptic grid. To die of a heart attack on the toilet is an ignominious way to go, but it shouldn’t affect the veracity of the bullshit stories one has passed off as no word of a lie and as true’s God. This is something I feel firmly about, and I can say that the fact he died on the toilet made fuckall difference to the way I remember his story.

 

It went like this.

When he finally topped the rise the twilight had faded into dusk. In the murk ahead he was just able to discern a broad flat valley backed by a line of black hills. The building stood on the open plain, unprotected and solitary. To his surprise a feeble light glimmered at a window. What was there for people to do out here in this barren waste? He hurried on, anxious to beat the dark.

As he approached the building he began to worry about dogs. He had heard no barking but at any moment he expected the silence to be torn by a warning howl followed by furious baying. He had no means of protecting himself. From what he could make out the house was in a state of neglect but the windows were still glazed and he saw the glint of metal against the dark solidity of the front door. As quietly as he could he approached the lighted window and looked in. The room was dimly lit by candles and a single oil lamp. On the table lay the body of a man covered with a plain white sheet. The sheet was drawn up to his neck and his chin pointed sharply ceilingward. Not a young man, maybe fifty or sixty, a gaunt face and bald dome of a head. Then from the right there appeared a woman, barefoot, long hair flowing loose, tying the belt of a bathrobe. Carelessly she tossed a towel over a chair and went to the sideboard. She lit a cigarette and began to pour from a bottle into a glass. Jesus, what was he to do? It was almost completely dark and a hard wind had sprung up, helping him to make up his mind.

"Who is it?" In response to his knock on the door her voice was aggressive and without fear.

"A stranger. I'm a hitchhiker, stranded on the road."

After a few moments the door opened. It had been unlocked all the time. A flashlight shone in his face and then dropped to his chest and he saw she was holding an extremely large pistol.

"I'm so sorry to disturb you, madam. I've been overtaken by nightfall. You don't have an outbuilding where I could get out of the cold, just for the night, do you? If you can help me, I'll be on my way again at first light."

"Come in." She lowered the gun and he followed her into the room. "You've chosen a bad time. My husband's just died on me." He stood looking down at the pale skin drawn tight across the facial bones, the half-closed eyelids, the gaping thin-lipped mouth, the scrawny neck of a chicken. "Want a brandy?" She was at the sideboard.

"Er, yes please. Just to keep you company. For the shock. You must be…"

"He was ill for a long time. I treated him badly and he hated me. It's a relief." She spoke flatly, without emotion. This woman wasn't more than thirty-five, forty at the most. He ran his eye over the shrouded body and noted the splay of the feet beneath the sheet. The outlines struck him as entirely authentic, one hundred percent cadaverous. "The undertakers are coming in the morning."

He took the glass and drank the neat brandy.

My uncle stopped the story right there, but it was understood that he had gone to bed with the widow, and then hit the road again in the morning.

I like this story because it’s audacious and so improbable it might well be true. It has a startling freshness to it that makes me wonder if there isn’t something archetypal at work here. Like it seems to be loaded with unexplained symbolism of the type Carl Jung babbled on about. Something like a dream dredged up from the collective unconscious. Not that I believe for one moment in unscientific crap like the collective unconscious.

Now, the reason why I have recounted my uncle’s story is because just the other day I was reminded of it by another story told by no less of a gifted bullshitter than my good buddy, Cupcake.

We were at the other guy’s place and we were also drinking brandy, but it was topped up with Coke and not neat like in my uncle’s story. Cupcake had just got back from Joburg, where he had been visiting his sister. He had nearly written himself off while driving through the Karoo, and was still shaken up and in need of more than his fair share of brandy to calm his nerves.

“It was in the middle of the Karoo, about 50 k’s from the nearest town,” he said. “It was just getting dark when this buck runs out in front of me. Instinctively, I swerved, my wheels hit the gravel verge, and the next thing I knew I was crashing through a barbed wire fence and bouncing off into sheep country. Lucky I didn’t roll.”

“Did you hit the buck?” asked the other guy.

“No,” said Cupcake. “But when I went through the fence I smashed my lights. Otherwise, there was no major damage. Just a whole lot more dents and scratches."

“You must have got one helluva skrik,” I said.

“That’s for sure,” said Cupcake. “But anyway, there I was, trying to get back up on the road, and it was fully dark by then, when along comes this black dude in a bakkie and gives me a hand. He’s the farm foreman and says I can follow him to the farm house and stay there for the night. But when we got to the house, which wasn’t far away, a young woman opened the door, and she wasn’t charmed to see me. She said this wasn’t a good time, because her father had just gone and died. But I could sleep on the couch in the living room.”

“So, there was a corpse in the house?” I said.

“Yah, in the bedroom,” said Cupcake. “Anyway, after a while the woman offers me a drink and we sit there in the living room. She tells me she’s glad her father is dead, because he was a bastard. He treated her dead mother like shit and he treated her like shit, too. In fact, he treated everyone like shit. We had another drink and then the foreman dude comes in. He doesn’t say anything but goes down the passage and I hear a door close. The woman finishes her drink and says she’s going to sleep now, and also goes off down the passage and I hear a door open and close. So there I am, alone in the living room and it’s getting late but I don’t feel like trying to sleep. I drink more of her brandy and start thinking about the dead man lying in the bedroom.”

“Creepy, hey?” I said.

“Not really,” said Cupcake. “I was more curious than anything. So I get up and go and look down the passage, and there’s a door standing open and the light’s on. When I look inside, I see the corpse lying stretched out on the bed with a sheet over it up to the neck. I go in and take a closer look at this guy, and he looks a real old bastard, just like his daughter said. Heavy, brutal features. Now, just as I’m about to turn away, I take a last look and the fucking corpse goes and opens its eyes and looks straight at me.”

“What?” said the other guy, nearly choking on his b&c.

“Yah,” said Cupcake. “Looks me straight in the eye and I jump about a foot in the air. Then the corpse sits up and says He’s not really dead. He’s only been acting dead so he can catch his slut of a daughter carrying on with that fokken kaffer of a foreman. He gets up and goes to the wardrobe and takes out a sjambok. Then he walks down the passage, throws open a door, and all hell breaks loose.”

“Jesus!” said the other guy. “Then what did you do?”

“I thought to myself, Fuck it, I don’t need to get caught up in this kind of shit, and I ran outside, jumped in my car and drove off at speed, even though it was the middle of the night and I had no lights. I somehow managed to make it to the next dorp, where I stopped and waited for daybreak. Then I carried on back to Cape Town.”

By this time, I was experiencing an acute bout of déjà vu, and then I remembered my uncle’s story and realised why. Cupcake’s advemture bore some strikingly similar features to my dead relative’s, and both my buddies agreed with this observation once I had finished recounting the uncle version.

“Have either of you read anything by the Irish playwright JM Synge?” asked the other guy. There was a kind of startled look in his eyes.

“Nope,” I said.

“Negative,” said Cupcake.

The other guy doesn’t have shelves but there are piles of books on just about every flat surface. He went to one of them and extricated a volume.

“This is uncanny, man,’ he said. “Synge also wrote short pieces, and this one is called ‘Pat’s Story’. Let me read it to you.”

When he was done, we sat looking at each other with our mouths open, like we were a trio of half-wits. This Irish story was just too similar to the other two for there to be a rational response forthcoming.

“Well, I dunno what to say,” said Cupcake.

“This can’t be possible,” said the other guy.

“There’s something seriously fucking weird going on here,” I said.

 

‘Pat’s Story’ can be read in the next post.

 

Other pieces in the Me, Cupcake and the Other Guy series:

Good News for Old Toppies

Paradoxical Materialism

Rhino Reality

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.