LETTERS

hey dex,

i know you’re a fictional serial killer but you still mean a lot to me.

you’ve taught me about my sneaky little cunt of a dark passenger.  she is the reason i do most of everything.  everytime i think I’m free of her she begins controlling me again. the psycho-babble heads think i’m fine because i don’t kill people and chop them up, or rape little boys, or eat kittens, or vote.  the psycho-babble heads get exposed to so many fucked up people that they look at you and go “oh shit, really?  you think you’re fucked up?  keep paying me.  i will continue to listen to how fucked up you think you are.”

so i use you and your dark passenger as a metaphor to help them understand my dilemma.

“have you watched DEXTER?”

“it’s q’d on my Netflix.  my colleagues say it’s a great show.  what does DEXTER have to do with you?”

to which i reply:

“dexter’s dark passenger is this schizoid other-identity he’s created, or maybe realized, who controls his violent urges.  he kills other killers and chops them up into little pieces and dumps them into the ocean.  this satisfies the bloodthirsty American who needs watch tv see kill kill die and yet smart people like it too because it’s, like, psychological.  empathizing with a serial killer because of the dynamics shared between ‘normal people’ and super-duper-duper ‘social deviants.’

cuz really, dexter’s like you and me.

he wakes up early and showers, shaves, cooks himself some breakfast.  he gets to work and he gives everybody their favorite donuts.  they all think it’s nice of him, and he does other little performative things to appear as normal as possible.  just like you and me.  the masks we wear sort of thing.

but like i said, he chops people up into little pieces.

his ‘dark passenger’ is a personification of whatever it is in his brain that drives him to kill.  when he was very young his mother was hacked to death with a chainsaw as he watched.  this is sort of the psychological premise of his addiction.  and from here you can apply your dark passenger to whatever it is that programmed to seek whatever destructive patterns you seek.

it’s dangerous when you’re unstable and you think you have a dark passenger because you start to really think you have this alter ego, and so you kind of start going crazy.  also it’s pretty irresponsible to attribute your wrongful actions to some alter-ego that a fucking Showtime series convinced you have.  in any case, i have recently found that my dark passenger is some demon of a woman who needs a body and so i seek out this body and form intimate relationships with women, but the poor women don’t realize what i’m doing. they think i’m honest.  they think i can actually see them.  and my dark passenger makes me think i can see them, but all i’m really attached to is her.  it’s my dark passenger.   who she is, exactly, i don’t know.  but i kind of watched my mom get hacked up, too…

i watched my dad beat my her with a frying pan when i was four.  he kidnapped me and stabbed himself in the lung so that when the cops came he had this super convenient story because you know, who’s crazy enough to beat their wife then stab themselves to make it look like self defense?  they bought it, he won.

and for the year or so that he had custody of me for his violent lies, all he had to say to me about my mom was that she was crazy, evil, bad mommy, ugly, cruel, demented.  he took me to texas so he could go to religious school and take us both to Namibia so he could spread the disease of evangelicalism, and apparently he didn’t read the custody papers.  california only.  so my mom, who the court thought had stabbed my dad in the lung, got full custody of me until i was 18.

we lived in a guest house next to the garage behind my grandma’s house for the first couple years.  she never went to college and didn’t have that eyelash batting thing going for her, so on pure luck she got a secretary job after years of unemployment.  i watched her cry into the mirror and pray everyday before i went to preschool.  she must have felt like she was the most useless piece of shit for how my dad was.  it makes me hate men in general, and i have a hard time forming male relationships.  but i found out recently that my mom was cheating on my dad with some junky next door when my dad was supporting all three of us by himself, and i’ve been cheated on a whole bunch of times now and i know how that feels.  so basically both my parents did things that made the other person feel like the most worthless piece of shit ever.  anyway.

life’s easy.  you put on some clothes, ask people about themselves, remember their names.  read some books, bullshit about ‘facts,’ get good grades and impress people with how hard you can distract yourself from wanting to die all the time.  this one girl i know who i’m dangerously crushing on really hard thinks i’m ‘popular.’  i think she’s right.  for some reason people tend to like me.  but it’s hard for me to bring myself to like them.

people disgust me.  what i’ve told you about my parents is the tip of the iceberg.  growing up trying to find role models outside of a

broken home all i found were kids who have the same old fucked up prison, addict or death narratives.  none of them were even my real friends…”  at this point i’m a bit teary eyed, dex.  it’s hard to look your past in the face and talk about it when it’s that shitty.  the psychobabble dude taps his pen a couple times.

“wow,” he says. he stares at his shoes for a moment.  he seems uneasy, and i know this is fake because he’s heard way more disgusting stories than mine.  ”you’ve an inspiring worldview and i hope you write about it, professor cuddlecore.” he says.

“it’s A Pimp Named Professor Cuddlecore,  and i write a lot.  i’m actually fabricating our conversation right now and putting it in an anonymous zine.  it’s pretty egoist but it gets me off.”

he replies “well you may think this is a fabrication, but i’m real, and we’re talking, and what i think you need is emotional-corrective therapy.  that’s why you’re here and i’ll do my best to help you with that. so, um, what’s your drug history?”

“oh god.  ok.  i sold weed when i was twelve, tried acid when i was 13, flipped out from acid when i was 14, was hospitalized and given anti-psychotics for a few weeks, had another psychotic episode from ecstasy when i 15, was put in a rehab group home, ran away, lived with my grandpa for a year and ‘got clean,’ which was just getting away from that group of friends.  however i never knew how to integrate myself into a new social circle in my new high school so i got into local underground hip hop and started making beats.  i rapped for a while and it was nice, but it  was embarrassing and it still is.

when i was 17 i went back to my mom’s and developed an alcohol problem.  my women problem started when i was 18, and since then i have needed a woman who i am sexually engaged with to feel

secure, to feel any degree of self worth.  oh, and i had a sort of two week heroin binge about a month ago, which i stopped.  we have broken up and i’m not talking to her anymore because i love her too much to let her get to me.”

“you’re talking about heroin like it’s a girl.”

“well, i’ve read that opiate receptors in your brain react to opiates and love almost exactly the same way.”

“um, yeah.  i was just going to get to that,” says the therapist.  “and do you think you would abuse medication if we prescribed it to you?”  i nod my head, yes.  “uh huh,” he says.  “i want to show you something, and it may be a surprise to you.”

he pulls out the good old DSM and reads me symptoms and tells me that i fit bits and pieces of dozens of personality and mental disorders but don’t fit any of them and so he can’t diagnose me with anything and so what we need to do is have me scream at empty chairs.  and to talk about stuff.  sucky stuff.  a lot.  apparently.

“so, if i talk about stuff a lot… i might stop wanting to kill myself if i don’t have a girl who isn’t even a girl but the personification of a demon that lives in my brain because of my parents?”

“well,” says the therapist.  “i can’t guarantee that anything will ‘work.’  what i can tell you is that you are not an extreme case, and that if you can get good grades and smile at people and all of that, not to mention you’ve come to seek help from a person like me, that you’re on the right track.  you’re not killing people and chopping them up and trying to cover all that stuff up.  you’re just really scared of being abandoned.  if you had any idea how many people have the same exact problem as you, and that they’re in denial or just don’t know they have the problem, you would feel really lucky.”

so, that was a nice convo i had with the therapist.  in theory.  i haven’t had it yet, but i plan to.  in the meantime i watch your show for therapy, dex.  although i am bi-curiously attracted to your facial structure i really do like the psychological intrigue.  it does something to my balls, and my heart, that i could put in words if i wanted to but instead i’ll just embrace the quietude.

but dude?  season four?  what the fuck.  fuck you.  fuck.  you.

mostly i’m writing you because i think that maybe you should see a professional.  obviously, from what happened in season four, you probably aren’t looking at your blood slides as “trophies” anymore, are you?  & although you can’t tell a therapist that you go around killing people (there are things that i do and have done that i don’t know if i’ll actually tell my therapist…) you can talk about what it was like to see your mom get chopped into little pieces.  you can talk about whatever you remember from your childhood.  you could even pretend that you have never harmed people but that you get in bar fights and enjoy violence because of things that happened to you when you were younger.  make it up.  you’re good at that.

like i said, i know you’re a fictional serial killer but you still mean a lot to me.  i think that deep down you are a very nice person and if you were real i would enjoy hanging out with you.  at the same time it would be really awkward.  you would be wanting to kill people and i would be wanting to fall in love and kill myself.  maybe we should just be pen pals.  please write me back.  i have included my email.  i would give you my address but i don’t trust the mailmen around here.  they smell funny.

love,

a pimp named professor cuddle core

apimpnamedprofessorcuddlecore@yahoo.com

dear jack,

i got an email from one of my best friends this morning about how he never read On The Road, only pretended he did.

i never read it either. i read Vanity of Duluoz, and i have a good story about that but first, let me explain my friend.

he used to perform slam poetry pieces about you keeping in mind that anybody with some taste at least has a reaction to  the beats (you all had that effect). they didn’t have to like you or your scumbag friends, they just had to be familiar with your style.

i don’t mean your literary style, i mean your style. you know. full frontal emotional instability, romanticized drug abuse, rampant & somehow apologetic womanizing, chicken tucked johnson fetal position sob war loss stories running out of gas, money, purpose, your men, fingernails, mescaline on the train, in the cabin, in the diner, in the navy, chain smoking away the red scare loom shhhick! bullets by your ears, fuck the pigs, there are no pigs, no bullets, help!, questionably tasteful use of the word Negro, “writing in jazz form” (bullshit) and seeking refuge in Paris.

i can’t say i’ve mastered your style, but i can mock it well enough, eh?

the critics would say you were embracing a new American compulsion to express an inborn self-hatred that eats away at self-esteem until it rebuilds itself on a greasy old typewriter.

your friends would say you were the gentleman of your lot. would open doors for women and knock a guy out for talking about somebody’s mother.

(but you loved to waste our time in your parenthetical sub-novels, wasting words, wasting words, wasting… words)

and the life to live. yeah man, i know. I know.

utter satisfying doom.

no greener grass. death squads of the mind. eyes as egg shells. treaded on by past and future moments grappling for oxygen. the ingredients of a serial killer, a pedophile, a rapist, a wife beater, a crook, somehow past expiration. the chills. sobbing. seeing red. living a nightmare. awaiting the next.

like, O.

a puppet to your dark passenger, strings pulling you pulling the audience’s reverent appreciation for what appears to be haphazard placement of words beside each other. little do they know.

you’ve never read on the road.

you’re just lost.

so, that’s me. me being you. being me. being the me that you let me become. i guess.

my friend never went that far. he had his own style. he just used bits and pieces of yours for a split second to get a rise out of the audience. for a good score.

i don’t think you would have liked slam poetry very much. i can’t say i dislike it, but it’s awful corny.

my friend was great at it. he told such beautiful and mature lies and low and behold applause, high scores, winning. off to national competitions. hugging sage francis and spitting on mics blessed by saul williams..

slam is definitely an artform born out of layers of cultural history partially created by you and your cohorts, but on the shoulders of hip hop. i don’t even know what body part of the metaphor the beats fit into. the bleeding liver, probably. jazz is the genitals.

i can’t really say my friend is a fraud for pretending to have read you. i wouldn’t be surprised if half the shit you wrote in on the road was a lie. lying is in the job description of a writer. let’s be honest.

for example.

if i write about the day i carried mary’s bloody mother from the bathroom to the bed, raiding her closet for the vodka so her liver wouldn’t kill her and leave two children with zero parents, a futile attempt of ours which didn’t keep her from dying months later of exactly that, i don’t tell you about the fried potatoes i had for breakfast, the video games i played that day, what positions i fucked my girlfriend in, our conversations about incense and the doors, CNN, or which shirt to wear to the party tomorrow, or about that essay i turned in late about descarte and hume – i don’t even remember that day so i’m making it all up.

ninety percent of intense experiences are surrounded by mediocrity. it’s people like you, and me, who obsess over the intense experiences. in my case they’re usually traumatic experiences, but we’ll call it whatever. lively ones. crazy times. they leave apocalyptic inkblots in parts of your brain you never want to see again, but you don’t have a choice, and somehow you don’t have a choice in seeking more inkblots and seeing them not as unicorns and grayscale rainbows but as predators cancers torture devices corpses sobbing children mother destiny foiling, death, death, death, looming DEATH.

you put these traumas into little nice sentences and people go “hey i liked that thing you wrote it was nice,” and you say “thanks for reading it i am no more than a vile piece of shit, just like you,” but you don’t say that out loud because they can’t handle the person who actually wrote what they read, they don’t realize that tormented art comes from tormented people, and the act of standing beside them for more than a moment is a challenge because you’re pretty sure they have a generally OK mental state, and you don’t know the first thing about what they’re thinking. probably the weather, food, iPods, the mall, a television show. like you. but without the thoughts about from which angles to shoot your own head. and without the memories that have lead you to obsess over such awful thoughts.

if they’ve absorbed any of your work they know you’re fucked up, but if you’re in a conversation with them (most of them), that shit stays in the art. that shit is not you, and if it is, get yourself to a ward, give that psycho some sedatives. that motherfucker is a threat to my mediocrity.

write it, don’t live it. pretty much.

but if you write it and you don’t kill yourself – if you’re that tormented – well then you’re just bragging. “here’s the struggle, in 300 pages, with bits of maturity to mask the ego, now give me a cookie.”

you sporadically wrote about how people got obsessed with you, writing you letters mimicking your style (like this, a bit, I guess), women in love with you, men in jail, hatemail. it’s nice to get a rise. but did you ever feel like they just met somebody as fucked up as them and felt comfortable opening up to you? i mean face it, people are lonely. they don’t look for company on the road, in the cabins, on the trains. they look to Jack Fucking Kerouac to find themselves. i’m no exception. well, i am, but i’ll be modest. somebody is reading this for christ’s sake.

in your last book (only one i’ve read in full) you basically said at the end “i’m done braggin. hav a good night,” then you died a week later. that’s kind of nice.

there probably was something unique about the kind of life and literature you are known for, but as somebody who is pretty adventurous and tormented i think the only thing really special about you is that you had an audience, you milked it, you knew somebody who knew somebody, and you got to be Jack Fucking Kerouac. that’s kind of nice.

the first time I read you was on the cobblestone pigeon shit infested banks of the River Seine in smelly old Paris, France. somewhere between june and july. kind of nice.

i was layin under the eternal nuclear powered yellow lamps reading Vanity of Dulouz. i needed a friend. i was lonely. all i had was a backpack with some stuff and a loose itinerary. and i don’t know French, so. making friends is impossible.

all the young frenchies were singing together with their radios and cheese and wine on blankets keeping their slender bodies from touching the thousands and thousands of years of imperial pigeon shit, and they were happy. i could steal glances, and their glee made me happy, but in a melancholy way that anchored me back into you.

you were somebody i could really depend on. kind of.

i woke up the next morning drool and Kerouac in my face, noisy tourist boats and pigeons and i walked for two hours to the bottom of paris with all my heavy stuff and put out my thumb, inspired to hitch hike to Barcelona. nobody told me that Parisians don’t pick up hitch hikers. maybe when you were around they did, and you’re pretty good looking and you speak French.

i had plans to meet my friend in Barcelona within the week so i decided to take the bus, feeling very failed. not too adventurey. so i got on a bus and i sat down and i continued my romance with you. i also wrote about seventy pages in a little notebook during this trip, and by the end it was all one run-on sentence. thanks for that.

i finished Vanity and the bus stopped. everybody was getting out to go eat food at some place. there was a blonde girl and i was lonely and i can’t stick my dick into your books so i talked to her. actually she talked to me first. asked me a question i didn’t have an answer to. talking, talking. her head was on my shoulder once we got back on the bus and my heart was stirring with the horrors of feeling incipient love boiling, out to destroy me kind of thing. she was Canadian, 27, had fake tits, was a social worker and a sex addict, orgies, movies, believes in true love and is addicted to pills.

a month before i left for europe a man did my horoscope and said i would find love somewhere near paris, between june and july of that year. he knew nothing about my plane ticket.

her name was Kristin. we spent three nights together in the same bed, doing dinners, the beach, talking about love all the time. i don’t remember if i told her about the horoscope thing. after three days we had to go separate ways. i got her to the train and when she left i began to hate her. she pried for some emotion and i wouldn’t give it to her. that’s my kryptonite. giving in to women. giving into myself. always a bad idea. but then it turns into being their fault. mommy issues of course.

for a while I thought Kristin was my chance, my one true love, that i had lost my chance at permanent happiness by letting her get on that train.

since then i’ve decided that while Kristin had a great body and an awful mind – the kind i really, really enjoy – she wasn’t the love i found in paris. you were. thanks for writing, jack. for all the insanity i’m pleased you decided to write it all down.

Yours,

A Pimp Named Professor Cuddle Core