Your Next-Door Neighbor Is a Dragon

H
ello! This is James Joyce, famous Irish novelist and maybe Nobel Prize winner. When my dear friend Zack Parsons asked me to write a foreword for his new book shortly before my death in 1941, I was flattered. Though the manuscript would not be completed within my lifetime, I left this world with the utmost confidence that it would be every bit the equal of my finest works, which include
Portrait of the Young Man
and
The Odyssey.
Now, some six decades later, his work is finally complete. Though I’m not alive to enjoy it—

This Joyce conceit is already running out of steam, so I’m just going to drop it before you throw the book down in disgust; save that for later, because this thing gets much worse. I was just trying to get my foot in the door by pretending to be someone respectable, but really I’m only David Thorpe, one of the author’s detestable toadies.

Zack Parsons and I are members of the Greatest Generation (I’m stepping on the toes of some veterans here, but they’re mostly dead anyway) : we came of age before the rise of the Web, but got to it young enough to adapt. We now serve as an essential bridge between our parents’ generation, which has no instinctive understanding of the Internet, and the up-and-coming youth, who are so retarded by memes that they’re practically incoherent. One day, we’ll all have high-paying jobs as translators, explaining to the elderly what their young doctor means by “guy is p sick, idk wtf is wrong w/him, recommend can haz 2 aspirun and chillax, kthxbai.”

Having lived in both worlds, we’re the only ones who will ever see the Internet in its true context. Those who never lived without it take its weirdness for granted, and older people tend to view it with grouchy Luddite distrust, quaint ineptitude, or embarrassing, ponytailed “look kids, I’m Twittering from my bicycle” techno-utopianism. Then there are those right-wing fringe loonies who, despite the fact that the Internet puts the totality of human wisdom at our fingertips, condemn it as a force of perversion and evil.

We of the Greatest Generation know the real story: the fringe loonies are absolutely right, and we love it. If the Internet is any kind of accurate representation of the human psyche, our species deserves swift extermination. It’s a godless wasteland of insanity and grotesquerie, and in the time it takes you to read this sentence, a million children will be exposed to material more perverse than the Marquis de Sade could imagine in his ugliest fever dreams. It’s terrifying to consider how it will warp their minds; it’s a rootin’-tootin’ Wild West of outlaw id, and it’s horrifyingly reconditioning a generation’s perceptions of what’s normal.

The social consequences are already here: in just a couple of decades, the Internet has totally revolutionized the weirdo industry. In the olden days, sex weirdos had to indulge their seedy desires in shame and secrecy, delving into the George C. Scott
Hardcore
subculture of back-alley fetish clubs and underground mail-order catalogs. Now there’s Google Image Search, and a picture of a seven-foot Amazon shemale crushing a condor egg with her thighs is just a mouse-click away. What was once a risky, shameful pursuit is now fast, convenient, and anonymous.

And weirdo fetish porn isn’t even the craziest part, or the part that will have the most profound effect on society. The weirdo intellect is also being reshaped, refined, and legitimized by the massive worldwide weirdo network that is the Web. Consider the following example:

Let’s say you think you’re a dragon.

Years ago, you’d probably bury your regal dragon shame deep inside, fearing that anyone who found out your terrible secret would think you were off your rocker. Desperate for answers, you might go see a therapist about it, and he would likely use words like “delusions of grandeur” and strongly urge you to reconsider your idea that you’re a dragon. Through years of painful electroshock therapy and mind-numbing medication, you might kill the dragon inside you and begin a productive life as a drooling, ruined human being.

It’s much easier nowadays. Just type the words “I am a dragon” into Google, and you’ll instantly be dumped at the “Draconity FAQ,” written by a dragon named Baxil, which explains everything you need to know about being a dragon. With a long list of convenient answers to common queries like “Are you crazy?” and “Isn’t believing you’re a dragon escapism?” the FAQ assures fledgling dragons that they’re not alone, and that their perception of reality is just as valid as anyone else’s. Instead of rejecting their draconity and trying to cure it through therapy, they can embrace it, and maybe even “come out” to their parents, friends, and bosses.

If you dig a little deeper, you can find one of the many online Dragonkin communities. Now you can hang out with your fellow dragons and reinforce your beliefs among a group of people who won’t challenge you or call you crazy, because that would be a bummer. Instead of trying to adapt to your yucky human body, you can immerse yourself deeper and deeper into the dragon identity until it’s so entrenched that you start hissing at people on the street.

Of course, the dragon thing is just one example among a thousand in the Internet’s wide, wonderful weirdo rainbow. Deep inside, you might be an angel, an elf, a big sexy ostrich, a wizard, an anime character, a cannibal, a holocaust denier, or a Ron Paul supporter; whatever your wacky bent, there’s a dozen communities out there where you can insulate yourself among like-minded freaks until you’re convinced that you’re normal and everyone else is just unfairly persecuting you, denying your God-given right to identify as an anime Nazi dragon.

The Greatest Generation knows that the Internet isn’t just perverse and obscene:
it’s actively creating crazy people.
Isn’t it great? It is like Caligula’s brain swimming around in a fish tank. We don’t want to jump in, but holy shit, we sure do love to tap on the glass.

T
he finger bones of my right hand exploded like Chinese fun poppers stuffed into sausages. My experiment was a resounding success. I had proven that a car door
can
completely shut with a juicy human hand wedged between the frame and the door.

I heard the horrible crunch of the door closing an instant before I felt the pain. Then I screamed and bit down into the glazed doughnut I was carrying in my mouth. I exhaled a curse into the fried dough so terrible I have subsequently scrubbed it from my memory.

When I stub my toe I shout the f-word. I can only imagine the sort of twisted, high-yield, weapons-grade version of “fuck” that emerged from my mouth at that moment.

Things did not improve in the immediate aftermath of slamming my (motherfucking) hand in the car door. It was unfortunate, but my brain, the human brain, never evolved the ability to cope with that situation. My instinct when confronted with the explosive pain in my hand was to yank that hand in the opposite direction.

It’s understandable. That instinct has served the hands of fifty generations of my forebears well, protecting their fragile digits from fire, explosions, rolling boulders, giant tusked tigers, and dinosaurs. I’m sure that instinct will work just as well to protect my great-great-great-grandchildren’s hands from vengeful robots and laser dinosaurs.

At that particular moment, with my hand shut into the door of my car, with a spit-covered doughnut tumbling in slow motion from my wailing mouth, I yanked my hand away. I yowled and I yanked my wounded hand from the door with all of my might.

That was my brain’s rough draft at least.

The reality was a door that had somehow latched shut, securing my crushed hand in a vise. When I yanked with all my might my hand caught for a moment and then, with a unique ripping sound I will never forget, I freed my hand.

Or at least the inside part of it.

I looked at the bloody mass of my fingers, twisted and crimped and dripping blood, and I very nearly passed out. What I left behind between the door and the frame was a bloody glove bearing the fingerprints of four fingers and part of a thumb.

My doctors would later refer to this as a “degloving” or a “40 percent avulsion.”

“You should have open door first, Dumb-Dumb,” Dr. Lian, my Chinese doctor, would scold me in the coming days and weeks.

But that’s jumping ahead. That’s skipping the moment of horror as I realized I had just compounded a terrible injury.

I staggered back, my eyes flicking from the exposed pink and red insides of my right hand to the tattered cuff of bloodied skin dangling from the rim of my car door. I could barely even move my gory fingers, owing mostly to the severe fractures but also at least in part to the amount of pain I was experiencing.

Those people who tell you getting shot or breaking a leg barely hurts? Lying jerks. They’re just saving the surprise for you.

Gentle reader, you probably bought this book, which means I owe you. I don’t know you, but I like you. You have sound judgment. I sincerely hope a straight-shooter such as yourself never has your hand crushed and degloved. But, if such an accident befalls you, I feel you should be fully informed as to the degree of pain you might be expected to experience.

Allow me to go ahead and clear up any misconceptions on that subject.

It will hurt. A lot. How badly it hurts is difficult to say, but it will be measured in profane increments like “fuck loads” and “shit tons.”

You may scream a great deal as a result of this pain. You might even urinate in your pants. Really. You don’t think about that sort of thing, but when you experience a lot of pain, sometimes you lose control over other body functions. This may extend to defecating in your pants as well, although I was spared that level of indignity.

Don’t worry about peeing. You won’t even notice, what with the pain and most of the blood falling out of your body through the exposed meat of your hand. I didn’t notice as I began to empty my bladder. I was yelling incoherently and rolling around in a puddle of blood and doing a good job of smashing my doughnut.

Taking the groceries home was right out. Forget it. That frozen food could go ahead and thaw itself out in the trunk. Those Klondike bars could go ahead and melt. I had some serious yelling and peeing and bleeding to do.

My cell phone began to ring.

“Say, baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe
up
,” said Bill O’Reilly as his Robo the pimp character.

I was unable to stop yelling and bleeding, but I was able to reduce my crazed thrashing just enough to dig into the pocket of my blood-soaked jeans and grab my phone.

“Say, baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe
up
,” Bill O’Reilly repeated.

I managed to flip the phone open with my left hand and hold it up to my ear. It was covered in blood and smelled like pee.

“Aaaaahhh!”
I screamed into the receiver.

“Whoa, baby, turn down the volume,” exclaimed the voice on the other end.

It took a moment through the brain-curdling pain, but I recognized the voice. It was Lonnie Saunders, my editor from Kensington Publishing.

“Ahhhhhhaaaaaaaaa!”
I replied.

“Zack, baby, what’s with the screaming?” Lonnie sounded like he was chewing gum.

The best I could manage to reduce the screaming was holding the phone away from my head. People in the grocery store’s parking lot were beginning to gather around me. It seemed like they wanted to help, but they were afraid to touch me.

I can sympathize.

“We looked over your book proposals, baby,” Lonnie explained. “It’s all good stuff, really amazing stuff.”

I had just enough sense in my brain to doubt Lonnie’s sincerity. When Kensington requested a list of potential book concepts, I had given them two real choices larded with a bunch of ridiculous wizard-themed proposals.

There was no way Lonnie thought the wizard books were “good stuff.”

“Wizard erotica. I love it. Potion recipes? Great. You really know your wizards. I love the mercenary wizards book, too, but I think you need to flesh it out a little more. Now this other idea, this darkly humorous apocalyptic horror novel, what can you tell me about that?”

“Aaaaaggghhhhhhmmmmmmphh.”
I rolled my face into the puddle of blood as I screamed.

“Right, right, you mentioned an October one date. Do you think you could deliver by September one?”

“Aaarrrgh!”
I demurred.

“Whoa, calm down.” Lonnie cautioned. “We’ll split the difference. How does September fifteen sound? Good, good. Now there are some things, baby. I love the idea. Love it. But I think we need to change it up a little.”

“Aaahmphph.”
I let my face sink back into the blood as I sobbed my reply.

“You know it, baby. It’ll be twice as good. What I’m thinking is, what if, imagine this, instead of end of the world, you do the Internet. And instead of darkly humorous, you just skip the darkly part. Times are too crappy for that sort of thing. People want to be cheered up. Let’s make it peppy. Oh, and instead of a novel, it’s a guide. Sound good, baby?”

“Do you think he’s dead?” asked a woman standing over me.

“No, look.” Her husband nudged me with the toe of his shoe. “You can see the bubbles in the blood. He’s still breathing.”

“Breathing, what’s that?” Lonnie seemed to half catch the conversation taking place over my head.

I tried to gasp a response, but all I could manage was a weak gurgle.

“Look, I know you’re the best. You can write it all. Write a big hit about the Internet and people or whatever. Sound good?”

The man and the woman helped me sit up. I nearly passed out. The pain had by that point ebbed into a steady throb. I felt cold and nauseous. I was going into shock.

“Aaaaaaaah!”
My scream was becoming hoarse.

“Beautiful, baby.” Lonnie decided he had waited long enough for my answer. “If you’ve got any questions let me know. All right? All right? Great, baby. Ciao!”

“Aaaaaah!”
I replied, but the line went dead mid-scream.

The scream ebbed and I fell silent. The phone slipped from my fingers. I looked up at the man and the woman trying to help me.

“It’ll be all right,” the man said.

“Aaaaaah!”
I answered.

Not my most articulate series of conversations, but I did the best with what was at (skinless) hand.

Convalescence

My ambulance ride to the hospital is a subject for someone else’s book. Perhaps Vince and Janice D’Agostino, the retired couple who found me in the grocery store parking lot and summoned the ambulance. Janice held my good hand while the EMT injected me with some sort of industrial-strength opiate. I don’t remember much of anything after that.

The next few hours passed in a similar chemical haze, although I do retain brief flashes of memory. I was visited by several nurses and doctors. I came to know most of these people quite well over the coming days of surgeries and recoveries, but there were two doctors I considered “my doctors.”

Doctor Gerber was an elderly man with a lipless ribbon of a mouth. It was the sort of slack and inarticulate aperture that might have seemed at home on a snail or slug. It was adapted perfectly for suctioning up a meal of debris off the side of a gourd.

Doctor Gerber would walk into my hospital room, peer over the rim of his glasses at my chart, glance up and at a point about three feet above my head on the wall, and then walk out. The closest I ever came to having a conversation with Doctor Gerber was a bit of fleeting eye contact and a grunt as he replaced the chart at the foot of the bed.

Doctor Lian was the brusque Chinese doctor who I interacted with the most. He was the one who told me Doctor Gerber was the surgeon who would ultimately repair my hand. Doctor Lian was some sort of weird bone specialist whose job it was to inflict intolerable agony on me daily by drilling a series of screws into my fingers.

“You such a baby,” he complained whenever his drill churned through the local anesthetic and I twitched or gasped in pain. “A baby not even wake up if I do this. Just a tickle.”

It took two days of drilling and screwing and steel-plating to assemble the bones in my fingers. When Doctor Lian was done, my hand was covered with scaffolding. Painful scaffolding that wept blood and managed to ache through the morphine.

The Erector Set on my hand wasn’t even addressing the problem of not having any skin. There was a gelatin-like mitten over my hand. A nurse explained it was “keeping me fresh” and preventing serious infections.

I had completely forgotten about my ill-timed phone conversation with Lonnie, but that small mercy was not going to last. The pleasant opiate haze began to dissipate when Doctor Gerber ordered a reduction in my painkillers. The physical pain was bad, but the boredom was worse. When you’re drugged out of your mind you never realize how boring it is to sit in a hospital all day.

My roommate, a literal rodeo clown with a broken pelvis, dominated the room’s only TV and loved to yell answers at bad game shows. Buddy Bronc was his clown name; his real name was something boring like John Cooper or James Cobbler.

Buddy said he was “kicked in the taint by an ornery ‘spinner’” and was “just glad to have a dick.” He always wanted to talk to me about rodeos and having sex, which demonstrated an uncanny ability to identify subjects I never wanted to discuss with a clown.

Just before I arrived, an exceptionally massive nurse had made Buddy intimate with a Foley catheter. He wanted to discuss this inconvenience at length. The pain it caused him was the only thing that could cut through his sex and rodeos talk.

Have you ever read about the candiru fish? It’s a tiny silver fish in the Amazon that can follow a wading fisherman’s urine up his urethra. Once it’s nestled snugly inside the unlucky fisherman’s urinary tract, it latches on with barbs surrounding its mouth and drinks his blood.

The candiru drinks blood from the inside of the fisherman’s dick. The fish is in his dick. Imagine a version of the candiru you can purchase from a medical supply catalog. That’s a Foley catheter.

“Goddamn you piss a lot,” Buddy moaned whenever I stepped out of the bathroom. “Keep me up all fuckin’ hours.”

He was understandably bitter about my urination habits. While I was able to get out of bed and take a leak at night, the severity of Buddy’s injuries forced him to turn over that body function to a vampire fish wedged up his urethra.

Sometimes Buddy even managed to combine his urination obsession with one of his favorite subjects.

“Y’all ever peed on a girl?” Buddy asked me late on the third night of my hospital stay.

I confessed that I had not urinated on a woman and voiced no interest in doing so.

“You should try it. You got to drink a whole lot and then save it up. So you pee more and harder.”

I was willing to take his word for it.

“Sheila left me last week,” Buddy Bronc confided to me during a commercial break. “She took the dogs and all my DVDs.”

“Was it the peeing?” I asked.

“That’s my wife you are talkin’ about there,” Buddy snapped.

I apologized and Buddy seemed to accept.

“It’s okay. I ain’t never peed on her. Sheila left me ’cause I was still married to Rita. So me and Sheila’s marriage didn’t count. And I said, ‘Well, I got the license from Reggie work up at the courthouse.’ But I think she just wanted to pick a fight…”

Buddy was a terrible clown. While he digressed into a monologue about his girl Sheila, his “fat bitch” sister, and his previous wife, my mind focused in on the pulsing pain in my hand. It felt as if someone was taking a drag on a very evil cigarette and the burning ember at the tip was buried inside each of my shattered finger bones. I became hypnotized by the rhythm of the pain and almost drifted off to sleep when something Buddy was saying snapped me back to consciousness.