God Laughs When You Die

by Michael Boatman

  Advance praise for God Laughs When You Die

  Boatman grabs you by throat and drags you kicking and screaming through his prose. With a dash of Lansdale and a smattering of Martin’s Wild Cards, the tales within inhabit the dark and nasty side of our souls; and throughout Boatman infuses it all with a keen wit and an eye for detail. And when he lets you up to breathe, like God, you might just find yourself laughing. This is the sort of stuff I like to read as the bells sound midnight.

  Paul Haines award-winning author of Doorways for the Dispossessed

  Boatman's debut collection will knock you down and kick you in the teeth. Alternately hysterical, grotesque, bizarre, and fantastic, Boatman's collection is a must-read for anyone itching to get their hands on fresh new fiction that pulls no punches.

  Ronald Damien Malfi, author of The Nature of Monsters and The Fall of Never

  I was once a young horror fan who became an old small press writer and then a publisher. I like to think I may have discovered and helped a few good genre writers get their stuff into print over the years. Michael Boatman was a name I knew from television and the movies, but I must admit, I found myself most blown away by his potential as a writer. This collection certainly validates my initial impressions, and now you should reward yourself by reading these wonderful gems of prose.

  Bob Gunner CEO and Publisher Fat Cat New Media Inc./Cyber-Pulp Press

  Michael Boatman writes like a visitor from hell. Someone out on short term leave for bad behavior. I love this stuff. He's one of the new, and more than promising, writers making his mark, and a dark and wonderful mark it is.

  Joe R. Lansdale

  God Laughs When You Die

  Mean Little Stories from the Wrong Side of the Tracks

  Michael Boatman

  Dybbuk Press

  October 2007, New York, NY http://www.dybbuk-press.com

  Copyright © Dybbuk Press 2007

  All Rights Reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Publishing History

  Folds © Michael Boatman 2007

  The Tarantula Memoirs © Michael Boatman 2006, originally appeared in SUPERHEROFICTION.com in 2003 The Drop © Michael Boatman 2004, originally appeared in Horror Garage, issue 3 by Under the Volcano, Inc.

  Katchina © Michael Boatman 2005. First appeared in Revenant. A Horror Anthology. Carnifex Press

  Bloodbath at Landsdale Towers © Michael Boatman 2006, Originally appeared in Badass Horror by Dybbuk Press Dormant © Michael Boatman 2007, originally appeared in Lightning, by Under the Volcano, Inc.

  The Ugly Truth © Michael Boatman 2005. Originally appeared in Sages & Swords. Pitch Black Books

  The Long Lost Life of Bleak © Michael Boatman 2007 The Last American President © Michael Boatman 2006. First appeared in Red Scream, issue 0.2 2005

  Introduction © David J. Schow 2007

  All Illustrations copyrighted by their illustrators as cited on page 8.

  ISBN: 0-9766546-2-8

  Long ISBN: 978-09766546-2-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007920114

  Printed in the United States of America Cover adapted from “The Cure of Folly” by Hieronymus Bosch

  To Myrna, who tolerates my strangeness. And to Jordan, MacKenzie, Aidan and Jacob - the four points of the compass that guides my heart.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction by David J. Schow 9

  Folds 15

  The Tarantula Memoirs 37

  The Drop 53

  Katchina 69

  Bloodbath at Landsdale Towers 81

  Dormant 97

  The Ugly Truth 101

  The Long Lost Life of Rufus Bleak 119 The Last American President 135

  Illustrations

  “Fat Kid” by John Perry 36

  “Dead Superheroes” by John Perry 51

  “Moonlight Murder” by Amanda Rehagen 64

  “Happy Couple” by Amanda Rehagen 71

  “Cowboy” by Amanda Rehagen 90

  “Zuvembie”

  by Vanesa Littlecrow Wojtanowicz 114

  “Kung Fu Decapitation” by John Perry 118

  “The Pope & Joan Collins”

  by Vanesa Littlecrow Wojtanowicz 134

  “Dino”

  by Vanesa Littlecrow Wojtanowicz and Ciro 142

  Mike Laughs When You Read By David J. Schow

  Most of you think you know this man Boatman.

  You watch movies, TV shows, and you can Google. You’ve formed opinions predicated on celebrity, performance, publicity, dish, or hearsay; and you think you know what you’re talking about. Right about now you may be experiencing the sensation that maybe; just maybe you’ve missed the boat, man.

  I had no idea that Michael Boatman had been keeping tabs on me; forming similar logic chains. He’s sneaky like that. I had even less of a shred of an idea that Mike actually possessed a slant of mind and tilted POV very akin to my own forms of functional dementia. And I had even less than a biopsy of a molecule of a notion that Mike had been driven by the friendly demons inside his skull to write some of this stuff down - as stories.

  Not a clue had I. Who knew?

  When I mentioned “tilted POV,” above, you need merely recall the visual significators found in any old Twilight Zone episode (one of the good ones), where our narrative is rolling nicely along, and suddenly we’re hit with what cameramen call a “Dutch angle,” which means that what we’re seeing suddenly veers off-axis, the frame skews from a square to a parallelogram, and the borders of the boxed picture seem to melt and run, distorting what is seen (usually with the help of a good 18-mil lens to impart a fisheye effect with which you may also be familiar). It’s one of the simplest tricks in the repertoire of the cinematographer, but one of the most effective.

  Abruptly your reliance on the fidelity of your narrator has been cast into doubt; your “I-guy” has become a trickster. You are aware that the window through which you are witnessing the fictive reality of a photoplay may be imposing its own alien bias on the story. This is a very potent form of magic, not to be wielded by amateurs. Every storyteller depends on a tacit pact between performer and audience: You sit still and I’ll tell you a story. Go a little further, trust me, suspend your disbelief and buy into my “what-if,” and I just might tell you a real asskicker of a story.

  Mike sent me some stories and it quickly became clear that he had jumped right to the asskicking part, smash cut.

  Now obviously this writer/reader compact will not work for people who dully absorb their fiction with that old I-just-want-to-be-entertained attitude. That’s great if you prefer to sit and sponge up words or images that do nothing but kill your time. But if you like to be goosed, thrilled and enlightened, you are risking the ultra-keen edge of participation, and that’s much more fun. That’s the difference between a run-of-the-mill horror story and what the Germans have seen fit to call phantastiche literatur.

  Horror stories are presumed to be these neat little envelopes of dread to be opened and shut at will, not letter bombs that detonate in your face and spray you with the harsh reality of your own reliably ingrained phobias about sex, race, or ideologies. Bang — you’re not looking out of safe window at a disposable fear; you’re looking in a goddamned mirror, and you may deny what you see, but there it is … then Boatman tilts the friggin’ mirror and the world goes all funhouse on you. That’s the phantastiche - chimerical, grotesque, fanciful, wild, magnificent in its exuberance.

  Lesser horror stories are content to bitch slap the
reader with a gross-out, but our own Mr. Boatman arrives with an innate understanding that gross-outs are not only entry level, but - hell - they’re kind of funny in their extremes. The worst ones are usually just an overload of forensic detail. The best ones make you laugh and recoil at the same time. For this, one needs Michael’s knack for the apocalyptic simile (“The mattress smelled like the septic field of a Mexican abortion clinic at high tide”) or the one-step-beyond metaphor (“the kind of chemical satisfaction that squirmed its way down into your DNA, checked out the accommodations and said ‘Make Room for Daddy’”).

  Also, he uses the word “normalcy” correctly. Not “normality.” I appreciate that. Plus, he sold many of these tales piecemeal to places that would publish them - ink on paper, so you’re not reading some wannabe’s internet delusions of talent or blogsturbation - until they piled up and demanded a book with a suitably provocative title as their more permanent home.

  Which brought me to the concept of BAM. Once Michael and I compared notes it became rapidly obvious that one of us was the other’s Brudder from Anudder Mudda.

  The ingredients of his youthful corruption cocktail were much as one might suspect: Monster mags, post-EC comics, Twilight Zone reruns and Night Gallery first-runs; those 1950s creature features with the best titles ever (think Attack of the Giant Leeches); Tolkien, Bradbury; read The Exorcist at age seven and somehow saw Night of the Living Dead before he was into double digits … and yes, splatterpunk galvanized him like a hot shot of adrenalin straight into the heartmeat.

  Nevertheless, you are probably visualizing Michael as that nice, personable light-comedy guy. And yet, like many horror writers denied the opportunity to craft good comedy (even though the tension-release architecture of funny stuff and scary stuff is distinctly parallel) Mike the horror enthusiast never got to crowbar Mike the actor-guy into anything remotely horrific. (Well, he finally made it

  - as I write this - into a theatrical production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, and that at least allows him to rub shoulders with a ghost, but you perceive my point.)

  So he put his rage on the page.

  Michael suggests the disenfranchised among us - the street dregs, the burnouts, the washups, the dimly-glimpsed otherworld of discards and those supposedly beneath our civilized notice - have powers we cannot suspect, because once we recognize the power, it’s already too late for us to report. Further, a higher social caste will not necessarily armor you; witness “Folds.”

  Good horror intrudes. It butts into your nice, safe sinecure and rustles up trouble. Sometimes it drips green on your carpet or molests your dog. Sometimes it shakes your perceptions like a terrier with a rat. Sometimes, the intrusion can change … everything, from the way you deadbolt your doors to the way you get your own POV slanted anew. Read for entertainment if you wish. Or read with a tilted eye toward learning new ways of staying aware, vigilant against night terrors that don’t wait until dark to get all up in your shit.

  Among your guides are a potent bouillabaisse of characters like Mohammed “Chun King” Jefferson, Stanky Methuselah, the Reverend Rufus Bleak, the Night Mother, Molo Pigsplitter, Jack Greer (aka The Tarantula), Death (him, her, or itself), the President, and the Black Possum. (I am saddened that you do not yet get to meet Harmony Tremontane and O-gazm of “The Gravity of Her Gaze,” or Ms. Wrong-Number-Who-Gives-a-Fuck of “Our Kind of People,” but maybe they’ll make it into a future collection.)

  You’ll go uptown to TV studios and downmarket to the ends of the earth, with a whiff of science fiction (if not futurism) here and there like a kick of imported spice. Quiet shivers, repellent revelations and a summer blockbuster of splatter or two await you. Zombie fans may be encountering the word zuvembie here for the first time (I used it in a story a long time ago and an idiot editor changed it; likewise the even more obscure zombi).

  I appreciate that Michael knows that word too.

  If night is something more for you than the coming of darkness, if you would like to visit “a place where the dead dance in fields of blood-red violets; where the air is black with power and the earth is seeded with ashes,” then let Michael take you for a little ride.

  And you thought you knew this man Boatman.

  FOLDS

  He was five years old and he was fat.

  Not the kind of “baby fat” that haunts the cheek and jowls of the average chubby American kid. Mohammed “Chun King” Jefferson weighed nearly a hundred twenty pounds after we’d stripped him down to his adult diaper.

  And this was before he started in on the smorgasbord we’d offloaded onto THE MORRIE STAPLER SHOW stage.

  “I don’t understand it, Morrie,” the mother, a pretty young thing of Chinese-American ancestry, said. “He wasn’t always like this. When he was born he was…”

  The mother stopped herself in mid-sentence and glanced over at her hog-sized chunk of offspring. Chun King was eating his way through enough junk food to poison a busload of Russian shot putters. He never even looked up.

  “Jesus,” I breathed. “Jerry, pull back and get me a low wide shot of the kid and the food. Then go in fast.”

  Jerry Salazar, the operator on Camera Two swooped in on the junior behemoth from the right side of the studio. I swore as the image of Chun King Jefferson, messy of mouth and surrounded by mountains of processed carbohydrates, swelled to cinematic proportions.

  The studio audience loved it.

  As the Co-Executive Producer and Director for MORRIE, I’d signed off on booking the mother/son act. I’d made all the customary promises, referrals for counselors plus a videotaped copy of the show to play for their hillbilly relatives.

  It was all standard bullshit, stated simply and without multi-syllables, to get everybody snuggly with the fact that we were asking these people to degrade themselves before a rabid national audience. I even shook hands with the mother before she signed the waivers.

  Now, as the studio filled with “ooohs” and “aaahs,” I patted myself on the bank account.

  “Don’t you move, Jerry,” I hissed over the headsets.

  “I mean, he’s normal in other ways, Morrie,” the mother said. “It’s just…you know…”

  “You’re worried about your child, dammit,” Morrie said.

  “Uh oh,” Cray Donavan, my associate producer, mumbled.

  “S.M.3.”

  I nodded. “Somebody ate his Prune Puffs this morning.”

  Morrie Stapler had three “Sympathetic Modes” for when he wanted to torque the studio audience. S.M. 3 was the one he used when he wanted to appear understanding while maintaining his trademark no nonsense image. Morrie’s I feel your pain, but I’m also fairly sure you’re responsible for it brand of tough love had knocked ‘em for a loop back in Morristown New Jersey, where he served as the Honorable Mayor Morrie for two infamous terms, before taking the national airwaves by storm.

  I hated Morrie Stapler. But, God help me, I loved my job.

  “Of course we all understand that, Sue,” Morrie said.

  “But I’m concerned about little Mohammed. Didn’t it ever occur to you to take him to a doctor?”

  “I’ve taken him to so many doctors,” the mother said. “None of them can figure out what’s wrong with him.”

  “He eats too damn much,” one audience member quipped.

  The audience went nuts.

  “Camera Three! Pull in. Pull in. Pull in!”

  As the mother’s face loomed large on monitor 3, I watched her eyes. She held her chin high while she waited for the laughter and the shouting to die down. She glared out over the audience, her eyes focused on some point far away from my studio.

  The Fading Queen, I thought.

  It was an old habit of mine, a holdover from the days when I wrote stories instead of copy; find some remarkable trait in a person and bequeath them a romantic title to match. Susan Jefferson seemed to shine with the quiet dignity of a Queen. Believe me; that quality set her apart from the scandal-hungry dunderheads that u
sually fill out our Friday afternoon audiences.

  “I believe her,” I said.

  Cray Donavan cocked his head at me. “What did you say?” he said.

  “I think she’s really looking for help,” I said.

  “Yeah, right. Help,” Donavan said, staring into the glowing electronic abyss. Onstage, Chun King was upending a family sized bag of Extra Cheezy GORDITOS into his yawning soup bucket.

  “These idiots sell every scrap of human dignity for a few minutes on TV,” Donovan said. “Just so they can be slobbered over like minicelebrities when they get back to whatever hellish burg spawned them.”

  “I know,” I said, the sound of my own philosophy banging in my ears. “But something about this one…”

  Donavan was staring at me with the kind of suspicion I typically reserve for ‘reformed’ sexual predators.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  Donavan shrugged and went back to studying the monitor.

  But I was growing more and more unsettled by the emotion flickering in Susan Jefferson’s eyes. I was ill-equipped to cope with sincerity at that particular plateau in my career. To say that I’d become jaded would be putting it mildly.

  “Camera Four, give me a quick pass over the audience,” I said. Toni Rinaldi, the operator on 4, panned her crane-mounted camera over the audience as ordered.

  “Right there,” I said. “B.B.W. on 3 looks good to go.”

  The image on monitor 4 changed as 3 pulled back and Rinaldi swooped down to snatch a tight closeup of the tears on the B.B.W.’s face.

  “That’s alright, girlfriend,” shrieked the Big Black Woman when she realized a camera was looking in her direction. “You a good mother!”

  “Yeah,” I said, breathing easier.

  “Much better.”

  ***

  “Am I the only one who’s hearing this shit?”

  Sarah Chang, my line producer, glared at Morrie with an expression that would have turned him to stone if he were human.

  “I’m talking about John and Jane Q Public, Sarah,” Morrie said. “Way out in the cornfields and ghettos of Asshole America. In Asshole America, things are a little more “black and white,” if you catch my drift.”