Novel Treatments / The Book of Joe (Analysis)
Prologue
I’ve never feared needles.
In fact, my first memory of getting a shot is one of my most pleasant. The doctor in his crisp, white smock holding a syringe in his hand like it was candy. The sharp, shiny little piece of metal disappearing into my arm in a flash of purity and pain. The excitement and sensation of pressure as he pushed the plunger. The sweet ache that lasted for hours afterward.
It was bliss.
As a kid, I didn’t give a shit about the lollipop. It was anticlimax. I just wanted the shot. And these were just muscle injections.
As an adult, I quickly learned the particular joys of intravenous injection. The instant rush and the myriad of tastes that blossomed on the back of my tongue like Easter lilies.
Morphine, bitter and warm like a mineral bath. Demerol, acrid and cleansing as the rain near a chemical plant. Dilaudid, sharp and overpowering as the perfume of a church deacon’s wife. And, of course, Mexican brown tar heroin, which never tastes the same way twice.
Sometimes it’s sweet and mild as mother’s milk on the breath of a dreaming infant. At others, it tastes of the musk and ecstasy of sex. The best heroin, though, tastes of earthy communion wine, and it’s blessed euphoria allows forgiveness of even the most heinous sins. It tastes of redemption, of dew on the grass, and bigger and better morning plans. Of harvest, and the reaping of new hay. Of unconditional and enduring love.
No, I’ve never feared needles.
Until now.
I fear the needle taped in my arm almost as much as the straps binding my hands and wrists to the cold steel rails of my bed. I fear the men in white coats who try to eat my mind, and the nurses in their tilted caps and fake smiles, carrying plastic-tipped syringes in their cold little claws, each one, too, with its own unique taste.
Valium, moist and dirty as summer fog in the bay. Haldol, dry and dusty as crumbled leaves swept away by the wind. And Thorazine, which surely tastes of the River Lethe, and its evil waters of oblivion.
They want me to forget, you see. San Francisco lies in ruins like a modern Babylon, a deep chasm splitting it like the angry mouth of God, and they want me to forget!
I won’t. They think they have succeeded in turning the needles against me. They don’t know that Joe showed me the truth long ago.
The needles have always been against me. I beat them once, I can do it again. And then…
Then I will stand on the mountain top and speak truth to lies!
Chapter 1
The Bible says the Son of God will return like a thief in the night. Now, I've never placed much faith in the Bible— hell, I've never placed much faith in anything— but I believe that part. You see, when I met Jesus, he was coming down a fire escape on Sixth Street with a DVD player under one arm and a laptop under the other.
To be perfectly honest, I was in no mood to meet the Christ that night. No mood to meet anyone. Why?
Fuckin gaffle!
Gaffle is a street word that can be either a noun or a verb. In its verb form, to gaffle, the word simply means to rip someone off, to give them false goods—as in, "Man, when I got home and put that bootleg porn in, a Mickey Mouse cartoon popped up. Muthafucker gaffled my ass!" Many are the ways in which to gaffle the unsuspecting. In its noun form, though, gaffle means only one thing: Fake dope.
Counterfeit crack, to be exact.
The thing about gaffle and dope fiends is this: We know it's out there. We know the hollow feeling, the disappointment of unwrapping the rock, heart thumping, palms sweating, and putting it in our mouths only to taste the numbing sensation of some backalley amalgam of Orajel and baking soda.
And yet, when it's two in the morning and San Francisco's finest are thick in the Tenderloin section of the city, when the Ellis Street brothers, the Civic Center Dominicans, and the Mexicans on Sixteenth and Mission are nowhere to be found, a crackhead will buy a wrapped rock from a guy who looks so strung out and is moving so fast that the pipe dream he's selling can be only one thing.
Fuckin' gaffle.
It was raining that July night in the city, and cold. Cold in the way that only San Francisco in the summer can be. Fat, dirty drops of water hit the concrete sidewalk like slaps. Loud, hard slaps.
I was soaked to the bone, and pissed, and trying to think of a way to get my hands on five bucks. Absorbed, you might say, in my own misery. It played within my mind like a soundtrack driven by the drumming of the rain.
Still, the sharp crack of a window being thrown open with enough force to rattle the glass in its frame drew my attention skyward, where Jesus was flying down the fire escape like a bat out of hell, arms loaded, legs churning, bare feet slipping and sliding on the textured, painted iron, all the while somehow managing to stay upright. It wasn't walking on water, but it was a damned sight to see. Until he hit the second floor access landing, that is.
It looked to me like someone had welded the rollers on the drop ladder, probably to keep non-paying guests out—this is Sixth Street we're talking about here—and when the Christ bumped the latch and jumped, landing with his full weight on the top rung, expecting it to slide right down to the street, well… it didn't. Fuckin' thing stayed locked like a pit bull's jaws on a toddler's throat.
Jesus, on the other hand, kept right on going down.
To this day, I still can't place a finger on exactly what it was that possessed me to dive under a scraggly, barefoot burglar on that cold and rainy night. Maybe I thought he'd split the cash from the sale of the goods with me, and I'd get to play gaffle bingo one more time before I had to find a dry hole to crawl into and crash. Maybe not.
Whatever the reason, that son of a bitch landed on me like a two hundred pound bag of bolts. The DVD player and the laptop hit the pavement with a crunch that told me I wasn't gonna be taking him over to the Philipinos in front of the Donut Star for quick cash, and when we got up, I could only gape at him in anger, disappointment plain on my bloody face.
The bastard was smiling. Smiling!
"What the fuck's so funny, asshole?" I asked.
He put a hand on my shoulder. I didn't shake it off. "I've been looking for you."
The voice didn’t match the appearance. Not at all.
"Yeah," I said, "looks to me like you've been looking for home electronics. In all the wrong places."
"No." The voice was gentle. Patient. "I've been looking for you."
"OK. I'll play. Why have you been looking for me?"
"Aren't you lost?"
I'll be honest. My first instinct was to kick the shit out that hippie bastard, and then rifle through his pockets. My second was to run, and not look back. Why not? I'd been doing it all my life.
I did neither. I looked him right in the eyes, and did something that went against every instinct for survival I had developed over ten hard years of prison and the streets. I told the truth.
"Yes," I said. "I'm lost."
He extended a dirty hand. I could see the caked filth thick beneath his nails. "Then, come with me."
Somehow, before I was even aware of it, I found myself walking next to him, one foot following the other almost on its own.
Scared the crap out of me, if you want to know the truth, but the fear was wrapped in a foreign substance that was kind of bright and tingly. A foreign substance I would later learn was hope.
“Call me Joe,” he said, as we walked into the night.
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I have the perfect image of Joe/Jesus. I like how such a dirty story featured the name Jesus. I also like the fact that you leave it up to the reader to decided whether this guy is just a dirty hippie, some mexican guy, or really Jesus. You made the explanation of the word gaffle fun…you did it creatively and it actually fit in that part of the story. Your details gave enough for me to picture this world as if I was watching it on television. Good luck with this…not to sound lame but it’s hip.
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Wow! This was very powerful and gripping. The language you used was effective worked perfectly for this pieces. The reader is brought right into the story and for the most part there for the duration.
“like Easter lilies.” I though this comparison took away from the overall mood of piece. I kept picturing literally Easter lilies blossoming out of someone’s tongue. It was more visual than making me think of a taste.
Great ending!
Love the title. Subverting the unflinching do-gooder of the Bible through a clever usage of the commonest schlubb moniker known to man is an idea I embrace with arms and legs akimbo. First sentence is also terrific.
This piece was fun to read and review, merely since the writing tries hard to retain its high-calibre aspiration throughout. You follow through on this ambition incredibly well, hiccupping a few times but trundling on regardless. Pages two to four showed me the zenith of your talents: eloquent, elegant and mesmerising. Some suggestions and praise:
“like it was candy” > more detail? What candy in particular?
“little piece of metal” > ‘tip of the needle’ would be clearer here.
“purity and pain” > this is an interesting phrase, although ‘flash of purity’ worked less for me. The image is interesting though. It also helps establish the subsequent cravings for the needle the narrator has.
“of pressure” > of the pressure
“the sweet” > that sweet
“was anticlimax” > an anticlimax
“just” > repeat
“myriad of” > when used as an adjective, the ‘of’ is superfluous (a common mistake with this word)
“like Easter lilies” > great description… clear, confident and emotive image choice
How about a colon after ‘morphine’ and ‘Demerol’ etc?
Terrific end to the prologue. Quite disturbing. The dark oblivious paths that have been walked along are described with the most eloquence and precision here. These images are some of the finest descriptions of drug intake and the sensations I have read on Urbis.
“arms loaded” > this image was impossible to picture
On the strength of this opening I would certainly keep reading. The prologue is a personal and original lament of an overmilked topic, and the first chapter is a surreal and gripping trip into the fast-firing imagination of the author.
Post more from Joe, please.
Claire
Prologue
Not only was this prologue REALLY well written and poetic, but it was rather captivating. The introduction of a child enjoying getting a shot so greatly pulled me in with curiosity as to what this character would develop into after such a strange taste. It successfully made me want to read on.
some other suggestions:
“The sharp, shiny little piece of metal disappearing into my arm in a flash of purity and pain. The excitement and sensation of pressure as he pushed the plunger. The sweet ache that lasted for hours afterward.” There are all sentence fragments. I think you should either connect them all with comas, or change them to work as stand alone sentences, such as instead “The sharp, shiny little piece of metal disappeared into my…” rather than the word disappearing.
-Chapter 1-
This story is rolling out to be pretty epic. Your descriptive, creative way of writing makes it all flow alright, and I have a personal interest in drug thrillers. I’d really like to read more.
Other suggestions:
“backalley” Back Alley is two words.
“crash. Maybe not.” I’d put a comma rather than a period after crash. Same here: “appearance. Not at all.”
The ‘opportunities’ are over – so, don’t know if the agents will still get to see this.
I think I reviewed this before.
Overall, an excellent piece of work.
It draws us in and keeps us following you.
You draw the character’s world so well, we do not question when he ‘accepts’ that he is meeting Jesus in Joe.
So, just a few suggestions for polishing this, while trying to keep the style.
“The doctor in his crisp, white smock holding a syringe” misplaced comma, giving incorrect emphasis to the smock. -> “The doctor, in his crisp white smock, holding a syringe”
“It was anticlimax” -> Either “It was an anticlimax” or “It was anticlimatic”
With the section on the taste of injections, just comment on this “Strange, but something entering your veins actually puts a taste in the mouth. Don’t ask me how that works.”
“each one, too, with its own unique taste.” seems to attach to the doctors, nurses or their claws. – > “Each syringe with its own unique taste.” or similar.
“They think they have succeeded…always been against me.” Badly phrased. Yu mean that they can’t succeed because the battle is alreay over, but instead seem to contradict yourself. “They think that they need to turn the needles against me…. “
“speak truth to lies” -> “speak truth to the lies”
The part on gaffle, essential, but you waste time and space going into the irrelevant meaning of the word. Cut this down to “In its verb form, to gaffle, the word simply means to rip someone off, to give them false goods”
Put the emphasis on the relevant meaning – > “In its noun form, though, gaffle means only one thing: Fake dope. Counterfeit crack, to be exact. It was the looming spectre of Gaffle that was pissing me off!”
“where Jesus was flying down” This is pre-empting, passing knowledge back through time. – > “where someone was flying down, someone I would come to recognise as Jesus.”
“beneath his nails. “Then, come with me.” ” Assing this to Jesus. “beneath his nails. He simply stated, “Then, come with me.” “
An excellent beginning.
I enjoyed the prologue immensely. As a needle phobic person I see this as my polar opposite. But I like that. I’m drawn into the character. When you say ‘pushed the plunger’ I think you could use ‘depressed’ in place. It sounds more clinical.
Loved your description of gaffle. I had no idea of what that was and now I feel confident enough to be able to use it in a sentence. Drawing me further into the character.
okay my first real bone to pick, “pit bull’s jaws on a toddler’s throat”. That is an ugly image and yes, it makes a point. I get that you are going for shock value in some of this but maybe this is a tad overkill.
You have some real talent here. I can’t pick at much and I’m drawn in. I look forward to reading more of this story.
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