by Hugh Howey
At that exact moment of uncertainty, of a nation poised between abandoning the symbols of our past or turning on the Kellen regime, Billy Grainger spray painted the following on the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial: You made me Kellen’s Bitch.
Crass. Offensive. Shocking. It was all those things, but it was Kellen’s irrational response that made the headlines.
Humor Hall of Fame speech, continued
BILLY WAS THAT evil combination of class clown and science nerd. He was a chemist with a vengeance, man. If you idiots learned anything from fifth grade, it was don’t pick on the class clown. But you especially don’t pick on the class clown with access to chemicals. Kellen fucked with the wrong man.
The Lincoln Memorial thing will always be my favorite. You made me Kellan’s Bitch. Holy shit. That’s genius. Honest Abe calling out the fascist fuck ruining his country. How pissed off and insane do you need to be to bulldoze the Lincoln fucking Memorial just so people won’t know what was written? Why didn’t Kellen just permanently close the memorial for repairs or something? I don’t fucking know, but the idiot did it anyway.
The dude seventy percent of the country knew was insane was suddenly acting insane to the other thirty percent. He was literally razing our national monuments to cover his fragile ego, and it was all due to Billy Grainger. Billy fucking Grainger the chemist nerd.
Centenary Prize speech, continued
AS AN APPLIED chemist, I hope you all will agree that Mister Grainger is a worthy recipient of this award, but we cannot forget that the foundation of this award is communication. Mister Grainger’s ability to take ideas and communicate them in a way that had a powerful impact is undeniable. Were his words and images offensive? Certainly. But we must remember that he was living in an offensive fascist dictatorship, and those words and images exposed the rotten core eating away at America.
Chemistry. Communication.
Billy Grainger represents both of those things, and those two things represent this award. Mister Grainger doesn’t only deserve this award, he typifies it.
Heroes of the Resistance speech, continued
IT IS DIFFICULT to comprehend why a leader would act irrationally, but it happens all too often. Perhaps at the root of it is the assumption that they do it because they feel like they can get away with it. Perhaps that is why Kellen responded so irrationally. Something about Grainger’s biting comments and profane images bothered him so much that he felt he had to remove them, and not only that—he had the power to remove them without consequence. So he bulldozed the Lincoln Memorial. He blew up the Arlington Memorial Bridge. When Grainger moved to New York, Kellen closed the Brooklyn Bridge, spending millions of dollars to swap out metal girders where Grainger’s paint had fused with the underlying metal.
There are other examples, and each one led to a response so absurd that you could practically see President Kellen’s face turn red in rage. It was hard to explain. It was utterly unexpected. It was crazy. And it fueled the revolution.
Humor Hall of Fame speech, continued
I WAS WATCHING Billy’s statue unveiling at the Monument to the Resistance and this stuffed shirt is giving a speech about Billy. He was like, We don’t know why Kellen acted the way he did and Why would he implode over graffiti and shit like that. Let me tell you, us comedians know. Nothing destroys a person like humiliation.
Billy Grainger, the class clown with access to chemicals, fucking humiliated Kellen, but even more than that—he humiliated those who followed him. So many of these left wing idiots tried to fight Kellen and his Nazi followers using logic and rational arguments. Are you kidding me? That shit never works. What the country needed was someone who would make fun of them for the idiotic, small dick, insecure, evil fucks that they were.
Thank God Billy Grainger came along. He didn’t argue state’s rights or human rights or any of that shit. He pointed at Kellen and fucking laughed. And he made us laugh. Then he pointed at Kellen’s followers and laughed at them. And he made us laugh at them, too. And, let me tell you, those fuckers didn’t like it.
The dumb fuck fascist enablers in this country could deal with being criticized for being racists, homophobes, misogynists, being ignorant as a brick, and even being called Nazis. But, let me tell you, they could not in any way deal with being laughed at.
Centenary Speech, concluded
BEFORE I CLOSE I want to step outside my role as academic and add an additional word that describes Billy Grainger: courage.
It is perhaps easy to ignore Billy’s great personal courage as we judge him through the cold eye of science, but it is impossible to ignore as we judge him as a human. After he was arrested while painting Resist! on the Golden Gate Bridge, society had already turned against the Kellen regime. We know of the military losses and the erosion of support for Kellen. For Billy, after he was caught it would have been easy for him to apologize for his crimes and to seek mercy. It is entirely possible he would have been paraded around as a propaganda tool and then imprisoned, with some opportunity to be set free after Kellen was overthrown. We all watched from here in the UK, and it was clear even to us.
Yet Billy did what he meant to do from the start. He spat in the face of a tyrant that couldn’t imagine being spat at. He imagined a message of resistance. He found an inspired canvas for that message. And he communicated it with his art. And, in the end, he was courageous and died delivering that message.
Ladies and gentleman, I am honored to posthumously award William Grainger the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Centenary Prize.
Heroes of the Resistance speech, concluded
PLENTY OF HEROES are honored in this memorial. Heroes who lost friends, family, and loves, who sacrificed their own lives to overthrow a fascist and evil regime. We rightfully honor all of them, as without them we would not enjoy the freedom we have today. Billy Grainger is undeniably one of these heroes. It is worth a reminder that after he was captured by nationalist forces, he had every opportunity to save his own life. He could have reasonably ascertained that the cause he fought for was secure, but for whatever reason, he felt the need to make one last statement.
Today, like with so many decisions of the Kellen regime, we have a hard time understanding how it could happen, but the execution of Grainger, shown live on TV, was the final nail in the regime’s coffin. By then he was a folk hero to everyone but Kellen’s most hardened supporters. Websites provided real-time updates as they waited for the next Grainger piece and wondered just how explicit it would be or what insult Grainger would use next. The machinery of public sentiment that Kellen leveraged so well to gain power was entirely turned against him.
We can only guess that Kellen felt the only way to put the Grainger problem to rest was to intimidate us all by showing what was in store for those who resisted. Kellen called him a bully, a traitor, and a vandal. But labels like that are immaterial when the man you plan to execute walks out with a huge smile as he faces his death.
Billy Grainger’s final act is as well known now as any historical event in history. It spread across the globe in seconds. The image ended up on posters, painted on buildings, and shared across every social network known to man. Grainger, the hero that he was, somehow knew that it wasn’t his permanent graffiti that would shut the door on Kellen’s power, it was his own personal message.
In hindsight, Kellan’s biggest mistake, his final mistake, was glaring and obvious—he locked Grainger in a cell and gave him a pen. Of course, he was delighted when Grainger wrote a lengthy confession the morning of his execution, but for that small and insignificant document, he handed his greatest enemy his greatest weapon.
I tell that well-worn story for one reason: to address the controversial statue created by Ruth Teixeira. She chose the highly personal and yet epic moment of his death to honor Grainger, and none of us on the board of directors could disagree with her decision. Yet it offended many. All I can say as a historian is that you can’t study history without knowing the co
ntext that surrounds it. It is the only way to get to the truth. And in the context of Billy Grainger, hero of the resistance, I present you his memorial statue… and the truth.
Humor Hall of Fame speech, concluded
Fuck, thinking of that crazy statue made me realize something—there is no way we can honor Billy as well as the goddam Resistance Memorial did. I about shit myself when they unveiled the statue. I kept thinking, Holy shit. They did it. They really did it.
So let me conclude by saying that the fucking nerd chemist class clown pulled off the greatest bit of humor in history when he was shot. I smile every time I think of it. Not Billy getting shot, you assholes, how when the Attorney General fuckhead said, “Reveal his traitorous heart” and they ripped open his shirt and there, drawn on his chest in the same black permanent ink they gave him to write his confession hours before was a drawing of his middle finger with that transcendent caption… “Fuck you, asshole.”
Do you get it? He knew this was a historically epic moment. He knew that everyone was watching. He knew that he was on the largest fucking stage any comedian ever had, and he just owned it. He flipped off all those fascist fucks with a smirk on his face. And to make it even better, now there’s this fucking statue of him surrounded by statues of stern-faced heroes and forlorn children, and it’s him smirking with a fuck you written on his chest.
I mean, have you ever walked through the memorial? There’s this awed hush and quiet solemnity, and then you turn the corner and fucking Billy’s chest is giving you the finger. That, ladies and gentleman, is the pinnacle of comedy. This fucking guy. He’s memorialized giving the finger in the fucking Memorial to the Resistance.
Hell, let’s shut this whole fucking Hall of Fame down. Ain’t no one going to top that.
THE VENUS EFFECT
VIOLET ALLEN
APOLLO ALLEN AND THE GIRL FROM VENUS
THIS IS 2015. A party on a westside roof, just before midnight. Some Mia or Mina is throwing it, the white girl with the jean jacket and the headband and the two-bumps-of-molly grin, flitting from friend circle to friend circle, laughing loudly and refilling any empty cup in her eyeline from a bottomless jug of sangria, Maenad Sicagi. There are three kegs, a table of wines and liquor, cake and nachos inside. It is a good party, and the surrounding night is beautiful, warm and soft and speckled with stars. A phone is hooked up to a portable sound system, and the speakers are kicking out rapture. It is 2009 again, the last year that music was any good, preserved in digital amber and reanimated via computer magic.
Apollo boogies on the margins, between the edge of the party and the edge of the roof, surrounded by revelers but basically alone. Naomi is on the other side of the crowd, grinding against her new boyfriend, Marcus, a musclebound meat-man stuffed into a spectacularly tacky t-shirt. Apollo finds this an entirely unappealing sight. That she and Apollo once shared an intimate relationship has nothing to do with this judgment. Not at all.
Speaking merely as an observer, a man with a love of Beauty and Dance in his heart, Apollo judges their performance unconvincing. It is the worst sort of kitsch. The meat-man against whom Naomi vibrates has no rhythm, no soul; he is as unfunky as the bad guys on Parliament-Funkadelic albums. He stutters from side to side with little regard for the twos and fours, and the occasional thrusts of his crotch are little more than burlesque, without the slightest suggestion of genuine eroticism. He is doing it just to do it. Pure kitsch. Appalling. Naomi is doing a better job, undulating her buttocks with a certain aplomb, a captivating bootyliciousness that might stir jiggly bedroom memories in the heart of the lay observer. But still. We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart; But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old, “It’s pretty, but is it Art?”
Apollo cannot bear to watch this any longer. He desperately wants to point the terribleness of this scene out to someone, to say, “Hey, look at them. They look like dumbs. Are they not dumbs?” But Naomi was always the person to whom he pointed these sorts of things out. That’s why they got along, at least in the beginning, a shared appreciation for the twin pleasures of pointing at a fool and laughing at a fool. Without her, he is vestigial, useless, alone.
He turns away from the ghastly scene, just in time to notice a young woman dancing nearby. She is alone, like him, and she is, unlike him, utterly, utterly turnt. Look at her, spinning like a politician, bouncing like a bad check, bopping to the beat like the beat is all there is. She is not a talented dancer by any stretch of the imagination, and her gracelessness is unable to keep up with her abandon. She is embraced of the moment, full with the spirit, completely ungenerous with fucks and possibly bordering on the near side of alcohol poisoning. Just look at her. Apollo, in a state of terrible cliché, is unable to take his eyes off her.
There is a problem, however.
Her heels, while fabulous, were not made for rocking so hard. They are beautiful shoes, certainly, vibrant and sleek, canary yellow, bold as love. Perhaps they are a bit too matchy-matchy with regard to the rest of her outfit, the canary-yellow dress and the canary-yellow necklace and the canary-yellow bow atop her head, but the matchy-matchy look is good for people who are forces of nature, invoking four-color heroism and supernatural panache. Yet however lovely and amazing and charming and expensive these shoes might be, they cannot be everything.
The center cannot hold; things fall apart.
Her left heel snaps. Her balance is lost. Her momentum and her tipsiness send her stumbling, and no one is paying enough attention to catch her. The building is not so high up that a fall would definitely kill her, but death could be very easily found on the sidewalk below. Apollo rushes forward, reaches out to grab her, but he is too late. She goes over the edge. Apollo cannot look away. She falls for what feels like forever.
And then, she stops. She doesn’t hit the ground. She just stops and hangs in the air. Apollo stares frozen, on the one hand relieved not to witness a death, on the other hand filled with ontological dread as his understanding of the laws of gravitation unravel before his eyes, on a third hypothetical hand filled with wonder and awe at this flagrant violation of consensus reality. The young woman looks up at Apollo with her face stuck in a frightened grimace as she slowly, slowly descends, like a feather in the breeze. She takes off as soon as she hits the ground, stumble-running as fast as one can on non-functional shoes.
Apollo does not know what has just happened, but he knows that he wants to know. He does not say goodbye to the hostess or his friends or Naomi. He just ghosts, flying down the ladder and down the hall and down the stairs and out the door. He can just make out a blur in the direction she ran off, and he chases after it.
There is a man in a police uniform standing at the corner. Apollo does not see him in the darkness, does not know that he is running toward him. The man in the police uniform draws his weapon and yells for Apollo to stop. Inertia and confusion do not allow Apollo to stop quickly enough. Fearing for his life, the man in the police uniform pulls the trigger of his weapon several times, and the bullets strike Apollo in his chest, doing critical damage to his heart and lungs. He flops to the ground. He is dead now.
UH, WHAT? THAT was not supposed to happen. Apollo was supposed to chase the girl alien, then have some romantically-charged adventures fighting evil aliens, then at the end she was going to go back to her home planet and it was going to be sad. Who was that guy? That’s weird, right? That’s not supposed to happen, right? Dudes aren’t supposed to just pop off and end stories out of nowhere.
I guess to be fair, brother was running around in the middle of the night, acting a fool. That’s just asking for trouble. He was a pretty unlikeable protagonist, anyway, a petty, horny, pretentious idiot with an almost palpable stink of author surrogacy on him. I think there was a Kipling quote in there. Who’s that for? You don’t want to read some lame indie romance bullshit, right? Sadboy meets manic pixie dream alien? I’m already bored. Let’s start over. This time, we’ll go classic. We’ll have a r
eal hero you can look up to, and cool action-adventure shit will go down. You ready? Here we go.
APOLLO ROCKET VS. THE SPACE BARONS FROM BEYOND PLUTO
There are fifteen seconds left on the clock, and the green jerseys have possession. The score is 99-98, green jerseys. The red jerseys have been plagued by injuries, infighting, and unfortunate calls on the part of the ref, who, despite his profession’s reputed impartiality, is clearly a supporter of the green jerseys. The green jerseys themselves are playing as though this is the very last time they will ever play a basketball game. They are tall and white and aggressively Midwestern, and this gives them something to prove. Sketch in your mind the Boston Celtics of another time. Picture the Washington Generals on one of the rare, rumored nights when they were actually able to defeat their perennial adversaries, mortal men who somehow found themselves snatching victory from the god-clowns of Harlem.
Fourteen.
One of the green jerseys is preparing to throw the ball toward the hoop. If the ball were to go into the hoop, the green jerseys would have two points added to their score, and it would become impossible for the red jerseys to throw enough balls into the other hoop before time runs out. The green jerseys are already preparing for their win, running over in their minds talking points for their post-game interviews, making sure the sports drink dispenser is full and ready to be poured upon the coach, and wondering how the word “champions” might feel on their lips.