The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Godzilla leaps and comes down on the doghouse and squashes dog in all directions. He burns what’s left of the doghouse with a blast of his breath. He leaps and spins on tip-toe through the wreckage. Black cinders and cooked dog slip through his toes and remind him of the old days.

  He gets away fast. No one has seen him. He feels giddy. He can hardly walk he’s so intoxicated. He calls Reptilicus, gets his answering machine. “I’m not in right now. I’m out doing good. But please leave a message, and I’ll get right back to you.”

  The machine beeps. Godzilla says, “Help.”

  SIX: His SPONSOR

  The doghouse rolls around in his head all the next day. While at work he thinks of the dog and the way it burned. He thinks of the little house and the way it crumbled. He thinks of the dance he did in the ruins.

  The day drags on forever. He thinks maybe when work is through he might find another doghouse, another dog.

  On the way home he keeps an eye peeled, but no dog houses or dogs are seen.

  When he gets home his answering machine light is blinking. It’s a message from Reptilicus. Reptilicus’s voice says, “Call me.”

  Godzilla does. He says, “Reptilicus. Forgive me, for I have sinned.”

  SEVEN: DISILLUSIONED. DISAPPOINTED.

  Reptilicus’s talk doesn’t help much. Godzilla shreds all the twelve-step program leaflets. He wipes his butt on a couple and throws them out the window. He puts the scraps of the others in the sink and sets them on fire with his breath. He burns a coffee table and a chair, and when he’s through, feels bad for it. He knows the landlady will expect him to replace them.

  He turns on the radio and lies on the bed listening to an Oldies station. After a while, he falls asleep to Martha and the Vandellas singing “Heat Wave.”

  EIGHT: UNEMPLOYED

  Godzilla dreams. In it God comes to him, all scaly and blowing fire. He tells Godzilla he’s ashamed of him. He says he should do better. Godzilla awakes covered in sweat. No one is in the room.

  Godzilla feels guilt. He has faint memories of waking up and going out to destroy part of the city. He really tied one on, but he can’t remember everything he did. Maybe he’ll read about it in the papers. He notices he smells like charred lumber and melted plastic. There’s gooshy stuff between his toes, and something tells him it isn’t soap.

  He wants to kill himself. He goes to look for his gun, but he’s too drunk to find it. He passes out on the floor. He dreams of the Devil this time. He looks just like God except he has one eyebrow that goes over both eyes. The Devil says he’s come for Godzilla Godzilla moans and fights. He dreams he gets up and takes pokes at the Devil, blows ineffective fire on him.

  Godzilla rises late the next morning, hung over. He remembers the dream. He calls in to work sick. Sleeps off most of the day. That evening, he reads about himself in the papers. He really did some damage. Smoked a large part of the city. There’s a very clear picture of him biting the head off of a woman.

  He gets a call from the plant manager that night. The manager’s seen the paper. He tells Godzilla he’s fired.

  NINE: ENTICEMENT

  Next day some humans show up. They’re wearing black suits and white shirts and polished shoes and they’ve got badges. They’ve got guns, too. One of them says, “You’re a problem. Our government wants to send you back to Japan.”

  “They hate me there,” says Godzilla. “I burned Tokyo down.”

  “You haven’t done so good here either. Lucky that was a colored section of town you burned, or we’d be on your ass. As it is, we’ve got a job proposition for you.”

  “What?” Godzilla asks.

  “You scratch our back, we’ll scratch yours.” Then the men tell him what they have in mind.

  TEN: CHOOSING

  Godzilla sleeps badly that night. He gets up and plays the monster mash on his little record player. He dances around the room as if he’s enjoying himself, but knows he’s not. He goes over to the BIG MONSTER RECREATION CENTER. He sees Kong there, on a stool, undressing one of his Barbies, fingering the smooth spot between her legs. He sees that Kong has drawn a crack there, like a vagina. It appears to have been drawn with a blue ink pen. He’s feathered the central line with ink-drawn pubic hair. Godzilla thinks he should have got someone to do the work for him. It doesn’t look all that natural.

  God, he doesn’t want to end up like Kong. Completely spaced. Then again, maybe if he had some dolls he could melt, maybe that would serve to relax him.

  No. After the real thing, what was a Barbie? Some kind of form of Near Beer. That’s what the debris out back was. Near Beer. The foundry. The Twelve-Step Program. All of it. Near Beer.

  ELEVEN: WORKING FOR THE GOVERNMENT

  Godzilla calls the government assholes. “All right,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

  “Good,” says the government man. “We thought you would. Check your mail box. The map and instructions are there.”

  Godzilla goes outside and looks in his box. There’s a manila envelope there. Inside are instructions. They say: “Burn all the spots you see on the map. You finish those, we’ll find others. No penalties. Just make sure no one escapes. Any rioting starts, you finish them. To the last man, woman and child.”

  Godzilla unfolds the map. On it are red marks. Above the red marks are listings: Nigger Town. Chink Village. White Trash Enclave. A Clutch of Queers. Mostly Democrats.

  Godzilla thinks about what he can do now. Unbidden. He can burn without guilt. He can stomp without guilt. Not only that, they’ll send him a check. He has been hired by his adopted country to clean out the bad spots as they see them.

  TWELVE: THE FINAL STEP

  Godzilla stops near the first place on the list: Nigger Town. He sees kids playing in the streets. Dogs. Humans looking up at him, wondering what the hell he’s doing here.

  Godzilla suddenly feels something move inside him. He knows he’s being used. He turns around and walks away. He heads toward the government section of town. He starts with the governor’s mansion. He goes wild. Artillery is brought out, but it’s no use, he’s rampaging. Like the old days.

  Reptilicus shows up with a megaphone, tries to talk Godzilla down from the top of the Great Monument Building, but Godzilla doesn’t listen. He’s burning the top of the building off with his breath, moving down, burning some more, moving down, burning some more, all the way to the ground.

  Kong shows up and cheers him on. Kong drops his walker and crawls along the road on his belly and reaches a building and pulls himself up and starts climbing. Bullets spark all around the big ape.

  Godzilla watches as Kong reaches the summit of the building and clings by one hand and waves the other, which contains a Barbie doll.

  Kong puts the Barbie doll between his teeth. He reaches in his coat and brings out a naked Ken doll. Godzilla can see that Kong has made Ken some kind of penis out of silly putty or something. The penis is as big as Ken’s leg.

  Kong is yelling, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I’m AC/DC, you sonsofabitches.”

  Jets appear and swoop down on Kong. The big ape catches a load of rocket right in the teeth. Barbie, teeth and brains decorate the graying sky. Kong falls.

  Gorgo comes out of the crowd and bends over the ape, takes him in her arms and cries. Kong’s hand slowly opens, revealing Ken, his penis broken off.

  The flying turtle shows up and starts trying to steal Godzilla’s thunder, but Godzilla isn’t having it. He tears the top off the building Kong had mounted and beats Gamera with it. Even the cops and the army cheer over this.

  Godzilla beats and beats the turtle, splattering turtle meat all over the place, like an overheated poodle in a microwave. A few quick pedestrians gather up chunks of the turtle meat to take home and cook, ‘cause the rumor is it tastes just like chicken.

  Godzilla takes a triple shot of rockets in the chest, staggers, goes down. Tanks gather around him.

  Godzilla opens his bloody mouth and laughs. He thinks: If I
’d have gotten finished here, then I’d have done the black people too. I’d have gotten the yellow people and the white trash and the homosexuals. I’m an equal opportunity destroyer. To hell with the twelve-step program. To hell with humanity.

  Then Godzilla dies and makes a mess on the street. Military men tip-toe around the mess and hold their noses.

  Later, Gorgo claims Kong’s body and leaves.

  Reptilicus, being interviewed by television reporters, says, “Zilla was almost there, man. Almost. If he could have completed the program, he’d have been all right. But the pressures of society were too much for him. You can’t blame him for what society made of him.”

  On the way home, Reptilicus thinks about all the excitement. The burning buildings. The gunfire. Just like the old days when he and Zilla and Kong and that goon-ball turtle were young.

  Reptilicus thinks of Kong’s defiance, waving the Ken doll, the Barbie in his teeth. He thinks of Godzilla, laughing as he died.

  Reptilicus finds a lot of old feelings resurfacing. They’re hard to fight. He locates a lonesome spot and a dark house and urinates through an open window, then goes home.

  Bubba Ho-Tep

  Elvis dreamed he had his dick out, checking to see if the bump on the head of it had filled with pus again. If it had, he was going to name the bump Priscilla, after his ex-wife, and bust it by jacking off. Or he liked to think that’s what he’d do. Dreams let you think like that. The truth was, he hadn’t had a hard-on in years.

  That bitch, Priscilla. Gets a new hairdo and she’s gone, just because she caught him fucking a big tittied gospel singer. It wasn’t like the singer had mattered. Priscilla ought to have understood that, so what was with her making a big deal out of it?

  Was it because she couldn’t hit a high note the same and as good as the singer when she came?

  When had that happened anyway, Priscilla leaving?

  Yesterday? Last year? Ten years ago?

  Oh God, it came to him instantly as he slipped out of sleep like a soft turd squeezed free of a loose asshole, for he could hardly think of himself or life in any context other than sewage, since so often he was too tired to do anything other than let it all fly in his sleep, wake up in an ocean of piss or shit, waiting for the nurses or the aides to come in and wipe his ass. But now it came to him. Suddenly he realized it had been years ago that he had supposedly died, and longer years than that since Priscilla left, and how old was she anyway? Sixty-five? Seventy?

  And how old was he?

  Christ! He was almost convinced he was too old to be alive, and had to be dead, but he wasn’t convinced enough, unfortunately. He knew where he was now, and in that moment of realization, he sincerely wished he was dead. This was worse than death.

  From across the room, his roommate, Bull Thomas, bellowed and coughed and moaned and fell back into painful sleep, the cancer gnawing at his insides like a rat plugged up inside a watermelon.

  Bull’s bellow of pain and anger and indignation at growing old and diseased was the only thing bullish about him now, though Elvis had seen photographs of him when he was younger, and Bull had been very bullish indeed. Thick-chested, slab-faced and tall. Probably thought he’d live forever, and happily. A boozing, pill-popping, swinging dick until the end of time.

  Now Bull was shrunk down, was little more than a wrinkled sheet-white husk that throbbed with occasional pulses of blood while the carcinoma fed.

  Elvis took hold of the bed’s lift button, eased himself upright. He glanced at Bull. Bull was breathing heavily and his bony knees rose up and down like he was peddling a bicycle; his kneecaps punched feebly at the sheet, making puptents that rose up and collapsed, rose up and collapsed.

  Elvis looked down at the sheet stretched over his own bony knees. He thought: My God, how long have I been here? Am I really awake now, or am I dreaming I’m awake? How could my plans have gone so wrong? When are they going to serve lunch, and considering what they serve, why do I care? And if Priscilla discovered I was alive, would she come see me, would she want to see me, and would we still want to fuck, or would we have to merely talk about it? Is there finally, and really, anything to life other than food and shit and sex?

  Elvis pushed the sheet down to do what he had done in the dream. He pulled up his gown, leaned forward, and examined his dick. It was wrinkled and small. It didn’t look like something that had dive-bombed movie starlet pussies or filled their mouths like a big zucchini or pumped forth a load of sperm frothy as cake icing. The healthiest thing about his pecker was the big red bump with the black ring around it and the pus-filled white center. Fact was, that bump kept growing, he was going to have to pull a chair up beside his bed and put a pillow in it so the bump would have some place to sleep at night. There was more pus in that damn bump than there was cum in his loins. The old diddlebopper was no longer a flesh cannon loaded for bare ass. It was a peanut too small to harvest; wasting away on the vine. His nuts were a couple of darkening, about-to-rot grapes, too limp to produce juice for life’s wine. His legs were stick-and-paper things with over-large, vein-swollen feet on the ends. His belly was such a bloat, it was a pain for him to lean forward and scrutinize his dick and balls.

  Pulling his gown down and the sheet back over himself, Elvis leaned back and wished he had a peanut butter and banana sandwich fried in butter. There had been a time when he and his crew would board his private jet and fly clean across country just to have a special made fried peanut butter and ‘nanner sandwich. He could still taste the damn things.

  Elvis closed his eyes and thought he would awake from a bad dream, but didn’t. He opened his eyes again, slowly, and saw that he was still where he had been, and things were no better. He reached over and opened his dresser drawer and got out a little round mirror and looked at himself.

  He was horrified. His hair was white as salt and had receded dramatically. He had wrinkles deep enough to conceal outstretched earthworms, the big ones, the night crawlers. His pouty mouth no longer appeared pouty. It looked like the drooping waddles of a bulldog, seeming more that way because he was slobbering a mite. He dragged his tired tongue across his lips to daub the slobber, revealed to himself in the mirror that he was missing a lot of teeth.

  Goddamn it! How had he gone from King of Rock and Roll to this? Old guy in a rest home in East Texas with a growth on his dick?

  And what was that growth? Cancer? No one was talking. No one seemed to know. Perhaps the bump was a manifestation of the mistakes of his life, so many of them made with his dick.

  He considered on that. Did he ask himself this question every day, or just now and then? Time sort of ran together when the last moment and the immediate moment and the moment forthcoming were all alike.

  Shit, when was lunch time? Had he slept through it?

  Was it about time for his main nurse again? The good looking one with the smooth chocolate skin and tits like grapefruits? The one who came in and sponge bathed him and held his pitiful little pecker in her gloved hands and put salve on his canker with all the enthusiasm of a mechanic oiling a defective part?

  He hoped not. That was the worst of it. A doll like that handling him without warmth or emotion. Twenty years ago, just twenty, he could have made with the curled lip smile and had her eating out of his asshole. Where had his youth gone? Why hadn’t fame denied old age and death, and why had he left his fame in the first place, and did he want it back, and could he have it back, and if he could, would it make any difference?

  And finally, when he was evacuated from the bowels of life into the toilet bowl of the beyond and was flushed, would the great sewer pipe flow him to the other side where God would — in the guise of a great all-seeing turd with corn kernel eyes — be waiting with open turd arms, and would there be amongst the sewage his mother (bless her fat little heart) and father and friends, waiting with fried peanut butter and ‘nanner sandwiches and ice cream cones, predigested, or course?

  He was reflecting on this, pondering the afterlife, whe
n Bull gave out with a hell of a scream, pooched his eyes damn near out of his head, arched his back, grease-farted like a blast from Gabriel’s trumpet, and checked his tired old soul out of the Mud Creek Shady Grove Convalescence Home; flushed it on out and across the great shitty beyond.

  Later that day, Elvis lay sleeping, his lips fluttering the bad taste of lunch—steamed zucchini and boiled peas — out of his belly. He awoke to a noise, rolled over to see a young attractive woman cleaning out Bull’s dresser drawer. The curtains over the window next to Bull’s bed were pulled wide open, and the sunlight was cutting through it and showing her to great advantage. She was blonde and Nordic-featured and her long hair was tied back with a big red bow and she wore big, gold, hoop earrings that shimmered in the sunlight. She was dressed in a white blouse and a short black skirt and dark hose and high heels. The heels made her ass ride up beneath her skirt like soft bald baby heads under a thin blanket.

  She had a big, yellow plastic trashcan and she had one of Bull’s dresser drawers pulled out, and she was picking through it, like a magpie looking for bright things. She found a few coins, a pocket knife, a cheap watch. These were plucked free and laid on the dresser top, then the remaining contents of the drawer — Bull’s photographs of himself when young, a rotten pack of rubbers (wishful thinking never deserted Bull), a bronze star and a Purple Heart from his performance in the Vietnam War — were dumped into the trashcan with a bang and a flutter.

  Elvis got hold of his bed lift button and raised himself for a better look. The woman had her back to him now, and didn’t notice. She was replacing the dresser drawer and pulling out another. It was full of clothes. She took out the few shirts and pants and socks and underwear, and laid them on Bull’s bed remade now, and minus Bull, who had been toted off to be taxidermied, embalmed, burned up, whatever.

  “You’re gonna toss that stuff,” Elvis said. “Could I have one of them pictures of Bull? Maybe that Purple Heart? He was proud of it.”