ALSO BY MAX BOOTH III
TOXICITY
THE MIND IS A RAZORBLADE
Copyright © 2015 by Max Booth III
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.
Bizarro Pulp Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:
Bizarro Pulp Press, a JournalStone imprint
www.BizarroPulpPress.com
The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
ISBN: 978-1-942712-47-3
Printed in the United States of America
JournalStone rev. date: June 30, 2015
Cover Art: Matthew Revert
Interior Formatting: Lori Michelle
www.theauthorsalley.com
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HOW TO SUCCESSFULLY KIDNAP STRANGERS
“I thought I smelled dog shit. Then I realized I was just holding Max Booth III’s new book.”
—Harlan Anderson
“I thought it was pretty okay.”
—Max Booth III
“Not an actual guide. What a fucking ripoff.”
—Weird dude who drives that van
“No refunds.”
—Publisher
THIS BOOK IS FOR VESTA STOUDT.
THE UNIVERSE IS FOREVER IN YOUR DEBT.
1. PHLEGM FOR THE SOUL
All Harlan Anderson wanted was a doughnut. A simple breakfast treat for a simple man who just wanted to relax all day and read shitty, pirated books on his eReader. Doughnuts and books were the essential elements of any paradise.
He’d gotten the eReader two years ago at a work Christmas party. A coworker had won it during the white elephant drawing and tossed it in the trash after the night was over, declaring “reading is for pussies”. Harlan had waited until everybody else went home before he dug through the wastebasket and collected it. He found it underneath a barely touched slice of chocolate cake, which he also took home.
Reading was all Harlan had in life. His friends were nonexistent and the majority of his family was either dead, in jail, or just uninterested. Books were his only real companions. Bad books, mostly. The kind of books that he didn’t even like to read but he read anyway just so he could have a reason to bitch on Facebook. Books like Sergio Placid’s Eight Equals Zero, or Nick Twig’s The Trampoline Incident. So, any BILF Publishing book, really. Books I’d Like to Fuck Publishing. Jesus Christ. What a dumb company name. No wonder their books were so terrible.
Harlan walked into the coffee shop at eight in the morning, licking his lips at the pastry images on the menu above the barista. For a man who didn’t socialize with people and spent the majority of his time at home, alone, the coffee shop was like a trip to Disneyland. He got to sit around with people that weren’t being forced to be near him due to work-related activities and eat fatty snack foods while drinking overpriced coffee. Reading at home certainly had its benefits, such as the freedom to lay around in the nude, but he often preferred to do his reading in public. Sometimes, if he was sitting next to someone who was also alone, he’d attempt to engage the person in a conversation about how much he hated whatever it was he was currently reading. Sometimes strangers would actually respond and continue the discussion. Sometimes they’d just stand up and walk away.
Today the coffee shop was playing the same Mumford & Sons song that was always on whenever he walked in the building. Sometimes the lyrics were different, but that didn’t make the song any different. The walls were littered with inspirational quotes inaccurately credited to Hendrix and Einstein. There was only one person ahead of him in line, and he was taking his sweet time to order. The guy looked like he was on meth or some shit. His eyes were all black and crazed looking. The paranoid look of someone who hadn’t slept in a decade. Words shot from his mouth like diarrhea from a flustered asshole, but not much of it was making any sense. Every few syllables, he would turn around and glare at Harlan, then turn back to the barista and attempt to finish his order. Eventually, the tweaker settled for a slice of lemon cake and fled the coffee shop.
“This city is full of degenerates,” Harlan said to the barista as he approached the counter.
“What do you want?” She stared at him, showing no hint of amusement. She could have easily said ‘What the fuck do you want?’ and it would have better matched her tone.
“Hello?” The barista rolled her eyes. “Do you, like, uh, want anything or not?”
“Uh, a jelly doughnut, please. And a medium coffee, if that’s okay.”
She raised her pierced eyebrow at him, probably wondering why anyone would ask if it was okay to order a coffee inside a coffee shop. He paid and took his drink and doughnut to the lounge area, planning on sitting in one of the shop’s recliner chairs and busting out his eReader. He’d illegally downloaded Sergio Placid’s The Cumming of Christ, and he was looking forward to learning why an English teacher would ever be stupid enough to assign the book to his students as required reading, as was the case of the teacher up in Portland—who, understandably, was no longer employed.
Except he couldn’t sit down, because all the tables in the coffee shop were currently occupied. He couldn’t believe it. Tables were filled by dickheads in tie-dyed beanies and teenage girls finding their cell phones’ G-spots. One table, a dirty, rancid old lady was just sitting there, eating her hair. Harlan stood next to her for a moment, hoping his presence would convince her to leave, but even when he cleared his throat she didn’t seem to take the hint.
“Excuse me,” he finally said, and tapped her shoulder. “Excuse me.”
The lady slowly lifted her head and smiled a toothless smile, then spit a glob of green phlegm in his face. Harlan screamed and fled the coffee shop, wiping his face off with the collar of his Big Bang Theory T-shirt. Gagging, he realized he’d dropped both his coffee and his doughnut inside the shop. Most of the coffee was on his shoes, burning his feet. He screamed a number of obscenities into the sky and flipped off God with his middle finger.
God responded with laughter.
No, not God. Just some guy standing behind him.
Harlan turned around. It was the tweaker who’d ordered the lemon pound cake. He pointed at Harlan. “Yo, didn’t nobody ever tell you not to mess around with Crazy Rita? She’s crazy, you know.”
“No.” He gagged again. “Nobody’s ever told me.”
The tweaker nodded furiously, still laughing. He reminded Harlan of the lunatic hitchhiker from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. “Yeah, dude, lady owns this city. The mayor gave her a key. You know, one of them huge keys they give heroes and shit? Yeah. One of those. So she’s allowed to go wherever she wants, eating hair and spitting in faces. It’s like, her right as an American, you know?”
Harlan rubbed his shoe against the curb, cleaning some of the coffee off. “I have to go home.”
He tried walking away, but the tweaker jumped in front of him and held out his hands. “Wait, wait, wait. I just . . . I just got one question to ask you, real fast. Cool?”
Harlan shrugged, irritated. “What?”
“Is your name . . . Harlan?” The tweaker leaned forward, raising his eyebrow. “Is your na
me . . . Harlan Anderson?”
“Uh.” Harlan stepped back, balancing on the edge of the curb. “Do I know you?”
The tweaker gave Harlan an apologetic look. “Yeah, dude, I think you do.”
Then he tackled Harlan into the street.
His eReader flew out of his hands and soared through the sky. The Cumming of Christ would have to wait for another day.
2. THE SURREALITY OF REALITY
At one point, Nick was positive the vomit on his face had been wet. Now, though, upon waking in the middle of who-fuckin’-knows-o’clock, the vomit was dry and pasted to his skin. But at least the odor had remained. And it provoked him to rush to the toilet and puke all over again. Afterward, he wetted a washcloth and cleaned his face off a little, then swished some mouthwash around his gums, savoring the burning sensation.
Maybe his brain had been replaced with one of those little cymbal monkeys and the little bastard was going nuts. Any other explanation for the current throbbing in his skull would be an understatement. He had no idea how much he drank last night, but clearly he had reached some sort of personal achievement.
Nick glanced down in the toilet and grimaced. Only about one third of the vomit had made it inside the bowl, and that was being generous. This was his apartment. He didn’t have to clean up his own sick. That’s why others stayed the night, so he could blame the mess on someone else and make them wipe it up. He whipped out his dick and pissed in the sink, watching his reflection in the mirror. His face could have been the toilet’s ugly cousin.
There was a shit-ton of work he had intended on getting accomplished today, but he knew, going by the way he was currently feeling, he wouldn’t do a thing all day. Maybe he’d just hang out and play some X-Box. Fuck it.
Sometimes he pretended like he was going to slack off all day and not get anything done. But he never did. He’d joke around on Facebook about being a bum who spent his time jacking-off and watching reruns of Veronica Mars, but that was only because nobody wanted to hear about him spending ten straight hours staring at a Microsoft Word document. People could relate to laziness.You start talking about business, and napping sounds a little too appetizing.
Instead of playing X-Box, he’d take care of a few errands, come home, and immediately get to work. There was editing to finish. There was writing to start. Books didn’t write themselves. Every second he didn’t spend progressing his publishing company and his own writing career was a second he might as well have spent in the grave.
There came a point when you were drowning in so many different projects with their own specific deadlines that reality as you understood it faded away. The projects piled up one after another, kind of like dishes gathering in a sink, a few at a time so you didn’t really notice, but suddenly you were being swallowed by that great avalanche known as the Eternal Hustle.
The background of your workplace area chipped away like flecks of old paint. Nothing mattered besides the work. Food was forgotten, sometimes purposely forgotten due to lack of funds. Conversations were abandoned midsentence. Sleep was cashed in for extra hours on the clock. The world around you became insane. People started arguing about True Detective plagiarizing Ligotti when it was obviously just a case of influence and homage, but every time you considered weighing in your own opinion, you forgot what everybody was arguing about and you found yourself back in front of another goddamn project, because you just finished one workload and now another was nagging for attention.
Feed me, Seymour . . .
So you worked on the new project and your eyeballs dried out because you forgot to blink and your stomach committed suicide because you hadn’t eaten in two days and none of it was important, none of it at all. The only thing that mattered was the next word you wrote, the next character you gave the gift of life.
You fled to your own private catacombs and locked the door behind you. Reality disintegrated and in its place stood a dream. A dream you experienced while awake, only you weren’t really sure you were awake. You weren’t really sure of anything anymore. You just hoped that once you finally did wake up—years from now, on your deathbed—the work you’d done wasn’t complete and total shit.
But until then, there was more work to be done, and there was never not going to be work to be done while Nick’s heart continued to function, and the great wonderful truth was he wouldn’t trade any of this for the world.
And even if his alcoholic agent wasn’t able to sell his new novel, The Owls in the City, to one of the Big Five, or the Big Six, or the Big Dick, then Nick would continue self-publishing his books through his own small press, because in the end, it didn’t really matter. The readers didn’t care who published what. They just wanted something to help pass the time between life and death.
Nick returned to the living room. Louise was passed out on the floor, naked. He vaguely remembered her and Stephen fucking sometime last night, but Nick had fallen asleep before either of them finished. He scratched the lice in his scalp as he stared at her, then realized how creepy he would look if she suddenly woke up, and ran off into the kitchen to see if there was any food. There wasn’t.
He was the founder of his own publishing company and he couldn’t even afford a fucking Pop Tart.
He reached in his pocket for his cell phone, planning on calling up Eliza and seeing if she wanted to buy him some burgers—Eliza never turned down a burger, and since she freelanced for multiple small presses, she actually could afford food once in a while—when he realized his phone was missing. He checked his bed. It wasn’t there.
It took him a few minutes to remember he’d thrown it at the bartender last night at Nightscapes. The guy had been an ultra-Christian and kept loudly disapproving of Nick and his authors’ behavior, so he’d chucked his phone at him. In retrospect, there were probably better objects to whirl at a bartender. Objects that Nick didn’t own and depend on daily. Like an ashtray, or the tray of peanuts on the bar that had begun to sprout some kind of parasite. Now Nick would have to go back down there and see if they had saved the phone or thrown it away. Even if they did somehow have his phone, it was probably shattered or, at the very least, sticky and gross.
“Shit.”
Nick dry swallowed some aspirin, got dressed, and drove toward Nightscapes, hoping he hadn’t been banned for life, although if he had, he’d understand. You didn’t throw dildo crucifixes at a crowd of strangers and not face any consequences.
3. INDENT YOUR FACE
Nobody knew how to indent a paragraph. Writers stared at their screens with an assortment of indentation choices, all of them wrong except for one. The answer was available online—all they had to do was Google the question. It wasn’t like they weren’t checking Facebook and YouPorn every ten minutes, anyway.
But no, looking up common manuscript formatting guidelines was apparently too much to ask from a profession as embarrassing as “writer”. So they did what they always did and clicked the goddamn TAB key. Eliza couldn’t conceive of a more selfish action, besides the rare fuckheads who actually used the space key three or four times to indicate an indentation. She firmly believed that it should be legal to scalp such a dubious, thick-skinned motherfucker.
Sometimes she was afraid of meeting a “space-indent” author in person, because she really didn’t know what she’d do. She believed she’d go into some sort of blind rage, like how Vietnam vets go all batshit whenever a balloon pops and they start shooting fools with antique rifles and gutting them with bayonets, or whatever they used in Vietnam. Like Eliza ever paid attention to that shit. Like there weren’t more important things to be doing in high school than paying attention to some bored middle-aged man talk about wars that had ended before she was even alive.
If it was up to Eliza, BILF Publishing would automatically reject any author who submitted to them without using the proper indentation formatting on their manuscript. If these people didn’t care enough to make their work presentable, then why should she care enough to edit it?
&n
bsp; To her, it spoke plenty about the type of author the person would be. If the author couldn’t pay attention to a few simple guidelines, then how could anyone honestly expect the author to take his or her work seriously? The type of assholes who didn’t care about indentation etiquette were the same type of assholes who did zero self-promotion besides once in a while posting links on their Facebook pages with the “pls buy my book lol” captions. Shit, they were the same type of assholes who posted about every new five-star review they received from their parents. This business was stressful enough without them involved in it—adding them into the equation was like a hammer bashed into an already livid migraine.
If it was up to Eliza, they would all be executed. Literally executed. Brains blown out all over their impotent keyboards.
What she needed right now was a break. She’d been formatting this book for the last four hours and if she messed with it any longer without getting a burger in her system, she’d drive her tiny fist through her stupid laptop. The final proof for Tommy Yorke’s Cock Mutants wasn’t due for another two weeks, anyway. She just liked to get a head-start whenever possible. In the past, her typical work schedule had involved digesting as many drugs as her friends could afford to offer for free and waiting until the day before a deadline to even start a project. But she’d stopped partying so hard once her parents kicked her out and she had to actually start coming up with rent money once a month. That wasn’t to say she was a total spaz or anything. She still enjoyed the occasional acid trip and casual orgy.
Eliza didn’t have a car, and she had too much shit to do to just start walking around town, so she pulled out her cell phone—more like lifted it from her desk because who doesn’t always have their cell phones out, in reach, just in case someone wants to contact you or you witness something extraordinary that you just have to record on video?—and called her brother.
He answered on the eighth ring.
How to Successfully Kidnap Strangers Page 1