The Orange Eats Creeps

by Grace Krilanovich

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Also published by TWO DOLLAR RADIO

  Copyright Page

  TWO DOLLAR RADIO is a family-run outfit founded in 2005 with the mission to reaffirm the cultural and artistic spirit of the publishing industry.

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  INTRODUCTION

  THIS IS A VORTEX OF A NOVEL. It’s a novel that takes leave of not its senses but rather of sense, and it demands the reader do the same. This novel is an onslaught, a bombardment before which attempts at refinement must be doomed. Calling a novel “dangerous” is a cliché but this one actually may be; in the years since I’ve become aware of it, when Grace Krilanovich first began composing it in blurts that caught people’s attention including mine, there are those who have tried to discourage its authorship. But it’s a book that seethes with defiance, written by the only sort of novelist worth reading: one committed to a vision that abides no agenda. Here is a book that insists on its glorious disarray, that finds in disorder a ravishing path to truth.

  I’ve never been sure if the young “vampires” who roam the northwest netherland in The Orange Eats Creeps are really vampires, and long ago I realized it doesn’t matter. Now of course there is a cultural vogue for vampires that can only exhaust itself sooner rather than later, and when it does, Krilanovich’s novel will be the one left standing, transcending trends it predated. Suffice to say The Orange Eats Creeps is not in the tradition of any contemporary writer popular or otherwise; it can’t even be read as an answer to anything. It’s too singular for that. To the extent that it has a tradition or cares about one, it’s the tradition that began with Blake and has continued through Coleridge, Brontë and Baudelaire, Barbey and Huysmans, the expatriated anarchists of the thirties and the untethered Beats of the fifties, the punk poets of the seventies and early eighties (Iggy and Patti, Richard Hell and Exene Cervenka and Henry Rollins, if not necessarily those people). A vampire novel then as Céline would have written, with dashes of Burroughs and Tom Verlaine playing guitar in the background: hallucinatory, passionate and gorgeous, hardcore by all the best definitions of the word. Twilight this isn’t.

  I’m probably getting too old to speak for the times, so I won’t guess as to how this novel speaks for them. I think it can be called a romantic novel, if you want to, but if so then it’s the romanticism of excess — of experiential derangement and a carnal nihilism that reveals itself as an act of liberation before it’s exposed as an act of courage. A young nomad haunted by visions of her lost sister searches for something she can’t identify, driven by a nearly feral instinct that will know what she’s found only when she’s found it. The woods she infests and the beaches she crosses are filled with wild music, wilder oaths and their subsequent betrayals, the wildest silences and the whispers that finally rupture such silences. The narrator falls into and out of the company of other young subterraneans. I think there’s love in here but that may be sentimentalism on my part. What there certainly is is a pulse, an arterial signal, a viscera of the psyche, and though for some the intensity and boldness may be a shock, for the rest of us the exhilaration of such a novel is nearly beyond calculation.

  For some time now — thirty years, maybe fifty, maybe for as long as the prospect of nuclear oblivion raised questions about relevancy that the noir of the forties and the bebop of the fifties and psychedelia of the sixties answered just by their being — North American fiction has struggled for a way to matter. Sometimes the struggle has been heroic and sometimes it’s been stillborn, in an afterbirth of defeatism, throttled by the umbilical of obsolescence. Without question, since the eighties our fiction has become either pronouncedly theoretical or, like so much of the culture, seduced by the kind of branding that communicates as shorthand. Except for passing references to dank-lit convenience stores that no one will mistake for glamorous, The Orange Eats Creeps evokes a limbo that’s narcotic and dream-blasted and could be Anywhere, Anytime except for the anxiety that feels as primordial as it does twenty-first century. No one can say for sure when fiction will take its next evolutionary turn. Perhaps it already has, sometime in the last quarter century, under our noses. Perhaps that turn is to the semiotic — good news for the theoreticians but not so much the rest of us. If, however, the pivot is to something else then let’s hope rather it’s a fiction of open wounds, like this savage rorschach of a book etched in scars of braille. If a new literature is at hand then it might as well begin here, at the eye of this vortex that strands us in a new home.

  Steve Erickson

  April 2010

  DISLODGED FROM FAMILY AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE and knowledge of your origins you become free in the most sinister way. Some call it having a restless soul. That’s a phrase usually reserved for ghosts, which is pretty apt. I believe that my eyes filter out things that are true. For better or worse, for good or merciless, I can’t help but go through life with a selective view. My body does it without conscious thought or decision. It’s a problem only if you make it one.

  SAFEWAY AT SUNRISE: WE STORM THROUGH THE doors; totally wasted we run for the back, behind the scenes. We barricade the door so Josh can menace the bag boy. What would happen if you harnessed the sexual energy of hobo junkie teens? The world would explode and settle on the surface of another planet in a brown paste, is what. Cockroaches would lick it up and a new wave of narcissistic gypsy-slut shitheads would hatch out of tiny pores on their backs.

  THE SUN IS SETTING. THE HOBO VAMPIRES ARE waking up, their quest for crank and blood is just beginning. Over the course of the frigid night they will roam the area surrounding the train stop looking for warm bodies to suck, for cough syrup to fuel a night of debauched sexual encounters with fellow vampires and mortals alike. They distribute sexually transmitted diseases like the daily newspaper but they will never succumb, they will never die, just aging into decrepit losers inside a teenage shell. They have a sense of duty to their habit and their climax — twin addictions that inform their every move. They are lusty, sad creatures, these Slutty Teenage Hobo Vampire Junkies. They traverse the Pacific Northwest’s damp, shitty countryside, forests and big trees, the dusty fields and gravel pits clearing a path of desolation parallel to the rail lines of Oregon and Washington, the half-blown-out signs for supermarket chains in strip malls featuring exactly one nail place, one juice-slash-coffee place, and one freshmex-type grill chain restaurant. Here everything is coated in brown-grey paste like moss at the bottom of a crappy tree… There’s lots of pollen around the supermarkets: Safeway, Albertsons, Ralphs. I always enter on the deli side. Here’s how I do it: grab a basket, put in one Us and one People magazine. Go to the magazine aisle. They never put Us or People over there but that’s where I like to look at it. The spaces in front and behind supermarkets are special. Our favorite spaces: parking lots, bus stations, free clinics, forests, public bathrooms, mall parking lots, foodcourts, behind diners, 7-Eleven coffee stations, SPCA kitten rooms, yard sales, pancake breakfast at the senior center, etc. We like smoking in restaurants; we like taking showers drunk.

  We are sluts. Wenot only devour each other, but webite, hard. We’re blood-hungry teenagers; our rage knows no bounds and coagulates the pulse of our victims on contact. We devour them too; the bodies of mortals become drained when they reach our fangs. Our cause is nothing, we believe in nothing. Actually, we believe in Methamphetamine. I’ve been living off crank, cough syrup, and blood for a year now. I ride the rails with a bunch of immoral shitheads, hopping freight trains, secreted away in rail cars across this country. We ha
ve no home, no parents. I can’t remember being a child, maybe I never was one. But I’m sure I’ll never die; I get older, my body stays the same. My spine breaks, and then gets back together. I have the Hepatitis, I give it to everyone, but it never will actually get me. Our kind doesn’t die from anything, all we do is die all the time.

  There was nothing but an orange wash of day left as I stepped off the freight car for the night. An ominous voice extended out of nowhere, whisking up dead leaves and small birds on the ground: tell us who we are. They dry hump reality, with only a tenuous grasp of decent living. They live parenthetically to organized society . Slutty first and foremost, an organizing principle, united by teen vampirism, hunted by militias and bounty hunters, reviled by polite dads and police everywhere. They arise out of the depths of sunken freight rail cars, out of an ashen heap to wreak havoc across the land, their chosen territory for crime and debauchery: your town. Don’t try and stop them; they have one tiny paw around your neck before you even know they’re there. They have dangerous, dirty sexual relations with their kind, and yours, constantly, so lock up your heirs. Doomed motherfuckers. They can hear what you’re thinking so don’t try to run, they’ll find you. You could be two thousand miles away and they can still see you. Hobos may fight for “existence,” righteous battles for the sap of tradition — the tramp code. Vampire hobo junkies, on the other hand, are reprehensible assholes who would rather whip your little sister raw than smoke a corn-cob pipe in a boxcar. Fuck them. Wrenched from foster homes across the country, teeth cut on whites at a tender age, these shitheads could really use some of your cash. Their insatiable thirst for drunk fucking, hard sucking, and speed freakouts will ravage your township and leave your mayor begging for more. Fuckin junkies, junkie legends… Knowles, don’t eat that pasta — that was on the ground! Is this still Lane County? Can we smoke in restaurants here? We have the urge to do a lot of things but only some stuff gets done, mostly for legality reasons. The dead bodies on the train tracks? That’s not us, that’s some local murderer the newspaper calls Dactyl — or rather, that’s what was signed at the bottom of a note the self-described “Janitor of Souls” submitted to the editors. This guy basically took credit for every unsolved homicide from the last decade, but it was so much bigger than him. Dactyl was just one more soldier in the unwar. The cops laughed at the photos of his victims, mostly clipped from snapshots of other people. The dead girls looked weird whooping it up all alone, caught in a fuzzy moment stripped of context or friends. They weren’t real pictures; likely none ever existed. The poor girls didn’t go to school or prom; they didn’t drive. They mostly just went about their lives, on a street where nobody looked.

  I’m only seventeen. That means I grew up in foster care and I’m really fucked up because I don’t know right from wrong. I became a vampire after I got screwed over by my foster family for the last time — just woke up different and I knew I had to leave the house for good. Now I suck blood for a living. I’ll suck dick for cash and admission tickets to events, shows and rides too, but that’s another story. This story is about how every night I climb down from the freight car where I sleep during the day and wreak havoc in a different town. I steal, I scratch, I suck. I don’t murder. There are a lot of other kinds of freight train riders to watch out for; those crazy fuckers with the piss-soaked bandanas hanging around their necks, those guys will fuck you up!

  Peering out of a tuft of brush into a forest clearing, the illuminated husk of a convenience store below, five white faces cold with pink cheeks and noses; warm breaths all in synch. Waiting for the call of their leader, a big boy, skinny, holding his concave chest bent comely like an insect or a wasp… Our bodies were empty, drained; we were only half there. Pulled up to the filling station, you could say. Given the signal we break loose from dry branches and tumble down the hill. We break into the 7-Eleven, surprising the clerk inside, a kid just like us, no older, no smarter — only still fully human, still 100% alive. We suck his blood, yeah, but not before making a mess at the coffee station, sampling tins of meat and peaches, trying on sunglasses, touching each other in the backroom… The boy loses consciousness about the time we get bored with our toys. Seth gives the signal to bail but I slip away into the back again, stooping low to the ground looking for clues to my lost little baby, my beloved true love sister Kim, now gone these fifteen months. She ran away from me and our fake family. I was real, though, I was a real person there, then, for her. We kept each other alive those long winters… Before rushing into the night I look for markings, etchings on the floorboards, hobo hieroglyphics maybe or a scrap of lace or strands of her long brown hair. But I find no trace, just old cans of engine oil and aprons and a bunch of nametags piled in an ashtray. None of the other boys understand, maybe because it’s hard for me to talk about and I end up just not saying much of anything. Instead I communicate with Seth (and certain other meaningful men) through my touch my kiss.

  I tried a fur coat on in a thrift store and the robocreep in a black three piece suit behind the counter said, in a German accent, that we must wear fur because we need to demonstrate to the “beasts” from which the fur was taken, who would “kill us if they could,” that we have mastery over the forces. But what doesn’t kill ya leaves its mark and you can read it like a book. I store the history of what happened to me here, in my body. This journey is going to help me tease it out. You get to watch. Along the way I hope to be reunited with my sister, my one true love.

  Unlike most kids I met my family when I was 12 years old. Kim was already living there but didn’t beat me by much. Dinner at our house went like this: green salad, arguing, praying at bedtime… It wasn’t so much that she ran away, she just clocked out. I left to go follow her. She wasn’t going to get away that easily.

  I’d always been raised to believe that the truth was within me. Who the hell raised me anyway? Maybe this journey was a way to find out. It may sound weird but I always have been aware of the fact — we always have held close as a motivating factor — that I can achieve greatness in my lifetime. We all are part of that for each other.

  I remember grabbing Kim by the shoulders: Who’s my family? I hissed in her face. Where do I come from?

  I felt as though one day my parents had been replaced with actors, or maybe I woke up to the realization that they had been actors all along. I felt unprecedented in history, origin-less. I was born every night.

  My lover said, as I left him and my would-be family back home for the last time, “I hope you find somebody to take hold of that face and never let go…” Well I still haven’t and I’m not sure if I’m going to. I had been bitten and changed in the night into something I didn’t recognize anymore. The urge to sleep all the time came soon after. I thought my life was ending, and in a way I was right. I may have looked the same on the outside but inside I was a monster. I was in a faraway place. Some could tell when they looked me in the eye that things weren’t right. I just wasn’t there; maybe I was already there. So I practiced saying one thing and thinking the other. I didn’t show my hand to anybody. My face only betrayed by half.

  Now I ask Seth the same thing, Who is my family? Who are these people?

  He pulled my arm, jerking me to the side of the crowd, “I thought you understood that if you were gonna run with us that you weren’t gonna make trouble — ”

  It must’ve looked weird to the outside observer: four lanky warrior boys with a sad-looking 17-year-old girl in tow, eyes trained at the ground. I wasn’t part of their army, but I was part of their war. “That wasn’t part of the deal! If you want to be with us,” Seth kept saying, “if you want me to protect you, you got to be cool!” So I kept quiet. Stayed at Seth’s side where he fed me and petted me and told me jokes. I never said a word but everybody said, Why don’t you smile, little girl? And asked, Why do you look so sad all the time? The truth was, they could never know: I wasn’t real. I wasn’t the way I should be, exactly — and I mean bodily as well as mentally.

  I passe
d, sure. But there was always an element of it that people got caught up on; hmmm they shook their heads as they turned from me. I had to find my sister. She was the only one who could help me with my problem. But it was getting so late. She could die any day. How long could a girl like her last out here? Exposed to the elements night and day, exposed to the lifestyle that her own self-styled “family” (that band of immoral teenage hobo jocks helmed by her b-f Rick) had shackled to her wrists? They were using her. And it was killing her; it was killing us both — we were real codependent that way. I had three months, tops, before Kim hit the ground for good. She was already falling, albeit slow at first. I was running as fast as I could.

  She had something on her I needed real bad.

  On the road I always got the lion’s share of unwanted attention because I was the only girl. God only knows how it was working out for Kim, considering who she was spending her time with. Ugh, that must’ve looked weird too, sad mopey girl lurking around with some dude and his friends… Seth was the leader of my group like Rick was the leader of hers. But Seth — such a weirdo! A neurotic Superbird. He had a way of being convincing through an unstoppable verbal onslaught, a sustained tone of syllables coming out of his mouth. He was almost 20, like all the others. I can’t remember where we met. Maybe school.

  I’m pretty sure I was born in Arcata, California. I don’t know how I became a foster kid. I often demanded of Seth, “Tell me where my real family is!” He just shook his head, “Your parents died when you were a little baby.” THEY DID NOT! I screamed. Thing is, in a dream my mother visited me as an angel, my father visited me as an angel — each taking an opposite form. I sucked the life out of one while the other sucked the life out of me — but we’ll get to that part way way down the road. Till then it’s about beginnings… I busted out laughing, “Beginnings?” I said to no one in particular. What an arbitrary mess of a word. Let’s dispense with all misguided (imprecise) (illusory) (disingenuous) terminology right off the bat.