Crab Town

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Books written by a lot of people I know are usually produced in this order:
1) the book is written

2) the book is titled

3) the back cover description is written

4) cover art is obtained
When I wrote
Crab Town
, I did all of this in reverse. My usual cover artist Ed Mironiuk had done this image of the girl on the bomb that I really liked. I decided I wanted to write a book based on the image. He was cool with the idea and even gave some plot suggestions, some of which I went with. Then I came up with a description for the book that went with the art. Then I called it Crab Town, because I thought the title somehow went perfectly with the art for no explainable reason. Then, finally, I actually wrote the book.

Crab Town is the first novella I’ve written since
Ultra Fuckers,
which came out about 9 books ago. I needed to get back into writing them because in my opinion 100 page novellas are the perfect length for bizarro fiction stories. After writing the two epics
Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland
and
Zombies and Shit
, I thought it was about time to write some shorter books for a change before moving on to the next epic I plan to write,
Seven Cyborgs
.

I went into this book wanting to just write a fun, dumb little bizarro bank heist story. But I think it became a little more than that. If there were a message to Crab Town it would be: debt is the scariest fucking thing in the world. Well, maybe it’s not scarier than say a tidal wave made of sharks and chainsaws heading toward your children, but it’s one of the most realistic things to fear because it’s the most likely thing that can, and will, fuck over your whole life.

Debt is the reason there aren’t too many full time writers or artists anymore. As a full time writer living my dream, I can have it all taken away from me at any moment. It’s happened to tons of writers that I’ve known. It’s called: not having health insurance. If you’re a full time writer you’re not getting health insurance. You’re lucky enough to be able to pay rent with the small amount of money you’re making. All it takes is to have a medical emergency, which is bound to happen someday, and without health insurance those hospital bills are going to hit you with debt so hard you’ll have to get two back-to-back day jobs in order to pay them off.

Fuck that shit!

Real life just isn’t set up for certain kinds of people, and artists/writers are one of them. Living your dream is worth the risk, sure, but you’ll often find yourself getting the shit end of the stick. So here is a story about several types of people getting the shit end of the stick. But these guys are far from living their dream. In the world of Crab Town, dreams were nuked a long time ago.

- Carlton Mellick III 01/21/2011 4:58pm

Most people are poor these days, but Johnny is so poor he can’t even afford to pay for gravity. They call him Johnny Balloon. That’s basically what he is. A balloon. There are a lot of balloon people these days. The worse the economy gets, the more balloon people you are likely to see walking (or floating) around town.

Only the most desperate individuals shed their humanity to become balloon people. The procedure is free. They basically scoop out all of your insides and turn your mind into a sentient gas which is then put into a human-shaped balloon body.

On the upside, a balloon person will never need to eat or sleep ever again. They never age. They essentially become immortal. But balloon people don’t have the operation because they want to achieve immortality (nobody would choose to live immortally as a balloon); they do it so they can sell their organs, which usually can be sold at a pretty high price. Healthy (or even slightly healthy) organs are always in high demand these days, especially due to all the radiation damage that people have suffered ever since the most recent nuclear war.

Johnny Balloon waves at the people he passes, as he walks down the sidewalk in the middle class district of Freedom City. The people do not wave back, but instead inch away from him with quivering eyes. All balloon people are considered creepy, but Johnny is an especially creepy balloon person. It is because his face is in a permanent smile, so wide that it makes him look like some kind of demented clown doll. When the doctor took the picture that was to be graphed onto Johnny’s balloon head, he suggested that Johnny make a normal face, without expressing any emotion. But Johnny didn’t like that idea. He’d rather look eternally cheerful than express nothing but apathy for the rest of his life.

Johnny tried to make the happiest, most cheerful face possible when the picture was taken. But, after he was converted into a balloon, Johnny realized he might have smiled a little too wide. While looking in the mirror, squeaking his rubber hand against his face, he noticed his smile did make him look a tad bit on the insane side. He still hoped people would realize, after they got to know him, that he was a happy balloon man and not really an insane balloon man.

Most balloon people do not have happy faces painted on their balloons because they usually don’t have anything to be happy about. Nobody enjoys being a balloon. Even the most optimistic balloon people eventually succumb to depression.

This unending depression in balloon people usually comes the first month they get their gravity bill. The doctors never tell their patients that they’ll have to pay for gravity before they get the operation. The balloon people go through with the procedure because they believe they’ll never have to worry about money ever again. But in order to get the gravity device connected to their feet, balloon people must pay a fee of $1750 a month or risk floating away.

All the money the balloon person makes selling his organs usually goes straight to paying off his gravity bills. After a year or so, the balloon person will run out of cash and have his gravity shut off. That is, unless the person has a job, which is unlikely because so few companies hire balloons. The balloon person would have been far better off if he never went through with the operation.

But Johnny tries to be optimistic. He tries to be happy. Even though he was screwed over by yet another scheme of the medical industry, he tries to think it was all for the best. That’s the kind of guy Johnny Balloon is. He doesn’t cry (not that he can cry) over the fact that he can no longer afford to pay for gravity. He figures a way around it.

Instead of spending his last $2000 on one more month of gravity, he said, “Screw gravity!” Then he got rid of his gravity device and saved the rest of his money for entertainment.

“Who needs it, anyway?” he said, as he tied his balloon string to a cinder block in order to weigh himself down. Now he carries the block around with him wherever he goes.