Novel Treatments / Finale 1 (Analysis)
It really wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about fame, or history, or glory, and certainly not money. It was not a personal thing. It was to transcend personality. If I was to go down in history, it would be because the people had decided. The people would decide if I was a hero, a murderer, or just another failed attempt. That’s what this was about; people.
The tiresome cliché states that in order to make an omelet one must drench a few streets in blood, or something to that effect. And this is the philosophy I took since I was a young wannabe gutter punk snot with some vague notion of the problems of social welfare, at Central High School. This is the philosophy which was to come to bloom, to prove itself, in my finale. The great plan, transcending personality. Destroyed by personality.
It is inevitable that such a group would attract people of such eccentric temperament. People with even a semi-regular degree of normalcy would not associate with the types of people whose lives are enough of a clusterfuck that they would find such an endeavor a viable option. No, we were, as we must have been, the human debris on the fringes of the hideous melting pot. Statements that would make any normal group shudder in revulsion were simple small-talk placeholders in our everyday conversations. We were of a different sort.
I had moved to Berkley to get my degree in psychology, and I fell in with a group of what you might call outsiders- activists, progressives, bleeding hearts, tree-huggers, queer-lovers, queers, god-haters… The list of labels goes on and on. I was none of these. I was different- a little off, you might say- even among these whackjobs. By the time I decided to fuck the system and extricate myself from the academic aspect of college life, I knew enough people, both from within and outside of the campus scene, to start devising my master plan.
Adam was an environmental psycho-extremist from Washington, who came down to Berkeley to get his poli sci degree, then a couple years after graduation decided he wanted to do something with his life, so he left us to get his MBA from UCLA, met some happening people there, and became a lead investor for Greenfund, an “Earth-friendly” speculation firm based in San Francisco. He gained a momentous upward mobility, until the title of CEO was bestowed upon him, and he sat on the top floor of one of the tallest and most aesthetic of the new “green buildings” in the greater American Corporate Empire, and there it stopped.
Twelve years, and his work was done. We had lost touch for the most part, as had he from life, but from his annual-or-so letters, this is what I gathered. And his work turned out to be meaningless, just as ignoble as your average Wall Street mogul, buying, selling, outsourcing, lying, cheating, bottom-lining his way to…this. He had chosen a course, and it was too late to go back. So he went ahead and offed himself by means of Toyota Prius and rubber hose. He did not play a part in our finale.
Kent was a recovering Republican from Clinton, Iowa, a Vietnam vet, a psychotically inclined raging alcoholic. He drove a big red Chevy pickup, had a comprehensive store of firearms, which would later come in handy, and was a pious member of an ultra-conservative evangelical church. His “official” position in the group was landscape and geographical planner, but the reason I kept him around was his aptitude with guns and explosives.
Then there was Dalia. She was…Dalia. Christ. What an enigma. No, that’s the wrong word. “Cunt” is what I’m looking for. That is quite literally what I was looking for, and it’s what I got. Quite literally, and so much more. She was nuts. A women’s studies major. I kept her around despite her penchant to induce vomiting. She was quite evil. Everyone warned me, from the beginning, that she would be my, our, downfall. They were partially right. I did not anticipate her return upon our reunion, or even her being alive, but Dalia is Dalia, and Dalia has a way. Fucking cunt.
So that was the original crew. The four of us were the backbone of the group, the ones who started it all, prior to my breaking out of the machine. I should really say that I was the backbone, but they were my circle, the ones I trusted. The ones who came later were the support, the expendable.
Dalia and I had met three or so weeks ago. She had just come from some psycho-feminazi gathering regarding the shameless use of women by the media as sex trophies and the right- no, the duty of every woman to be assertive and reject the role of submissive blah blah blah. I waited for her outside the café in my car. She ran out the back and peppily bounced into the front seat in her tight, white, low-cut see-through belly tube top and short-short, skanky cut-off shorts. She immediately threw herself on top of me, putting out my cigarette with the skin on her belly, not seeming to notice it. We immediately proceeded into the outskirts of town to what she called “our place,” and I called “inconvenient.”
It did not work out as planned. I got not what I came for. Halfway there, she became upset at my failing to save her any pot. She tried the silent treatment, but she is a very poor administrant of the silent treatment due to her innate desire to share her feelings with others, usually through screaming. I considered driving off of a bridge to put myself out of her misery, but this possibility was soon thwarted by a lack of fuel. We slowed to a stop on the side of Highway. This did not help matters.
Dalia would assert herself verbally any time, anywhere, but she would hold off on physical brutality while I was driving. Perhaps it was a safety measure. But now she had the right- no, the duty to hit, kick and throw to accompany the fabulous screaming, as well as another occurrence for which to punish me.
I could not retaliate, even verbally, for fear of being called a chauvinist-pig- male-oppressor, followed by more screaming of a more victimized nature. So I gently said, “Honey, I don’t want to fight, let’s just-”
To which she responded by throwing an empty beer bottle at my genitals, as she saw my response as just another symptom of my, what she called, “phallic thinking.”
The flogging continued for another several minutes, at which point a big red pickup truck loudly approached the ugly scene. “Stop,” I said. “Just stop. Someone’s coming.”
She reluctantly calmed down long enough to say, “I don’t like the look of this guy. He looks like a creep.”
“Do you have a better plan?” I said.
“I’m just saying,” she said.
The pickup stopped, and after a moment, the door opened and the fattest, baldest, greasiest picture of human misery stepped out, wearing dirty, oil-and-sauce-stained denim overalls, reeking of cheap beer. “What happened here?” he said through a surplus of phlegm.
“Out of gas,” I said, looking down.
He laughed heartily. “You forget to fill ‘er up? Well, I guess you’re in luck, ‘cause I got just what you need right here.”
He turned out to have a barrel full of gasoline in the bed of his truck. He put a generous sum of fuel into my tank with a ghetto-rigged pump contraption, and I helplessly agreed to let him come over to my one-bedroom apartment.
Dalia was livid. She elaborated on this for the duration of the trip back, with the man, Kent, his name turned out to be, following behind.
I called Adam and asked him to come over, as his presence usually alleviated some of Dalia’s pain, from my point of view, and because I needed to purchase a bag of weed from him to make my experience of Dalia more tolerable tomorrow.
That night, we ordered pizza. We all sat in the living room, myself, Adam, Dalia and Kent, with the TV off, and discussed cutting-edge politics, organic vegetables, the joys of I.V. cocaine, and the variety of explosive materials available to anyone with a few bucks. Had I not considered religion a social disease, I may have thought on that night that this thing was meant to happen. Then it happened; the discord that was to characterize our group for the years to come.
“So I suppose you kids like that Bill Clinton fellow, huh?” Kent said.
“No,” I said, “He’s just the same as all of them. Just another agent of the American disease. I’ll be abstaining from voting on election day in order to go burn a church, or better yet, a bank.”
Adam laughed and rolled his eyes in his pseudo-intellectual “knowing” manner. “Whatever, man. He may not be great, but he certainly beats what we have. My aim is to get that Bush hack out of there. I’m not voting for Clinton, I’m voting for not Bush.”
“And I’m voting for something much bigger,” I said. “I’m voting for fundamental change. Why bother voting? It does nothing. Come make a real difference and destroy some machine.”
“Give me a break,” Adam said.
“We’re just gonna get the same thing,” Dalia said, “if we keep electing these rich white men. We’ve had a war every decade, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer; maybe it’s a flaw in the male character. When’s the last time a woman invaded a country?”
“The last time a woman was a leader,” Adam said.
“Very funny,” Dalia said.
“Who are you voting for?” Adam said, looking at Kent.
“Perot,” Kent replied. “I’m with this guy. I don’t like either of them. So I’m voting for the little guy.”
I was furious. “Little guy?” I said, leaning forward. “You’re calling him the little guy? He’s a rich Texas billionaire oil man, just like Bush! He’s in on this whole thing too. Perot doesn’t give a shit about the little guy!”
“And nobody seems to give a shit about the little woman.”
“Please.” I immediately regretted this statement. I reached over, grabbed my stash, and began to pack a bowl.
Dalia looked at me with that cold expression that said, “you’re gonna regret that.”
Despite our differences, that night we found a common thread in that we were all very angry people, albeit with different said reasons. This common thread would hold us together and slowly destroy us over the next four years.
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This 211 word review has not been unlocked.
this will be short & sweet.the human debris on the fringes of the hideous melting pot. this line says it all. I am anticipating more. Characters need developing. Describe them, have them do something to reveal their character. My hand hurts I can’t type. Sorry:l
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