Spent Nation

By Will Berkeley

Spent Nation is my first novel. I wrote it in 1993. Louis Malle, the French film director, wrote me a personal note of support. It's what grunge looked like from the inside, I suppose. I have stayed true to the original vision. Spent Nation is road trip across the corpse of a nation. The incoherent voice reflects the incomprehensible land. This is a novel of spelling, grammatical and plot horrors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Will Berkeley
• Release date: Sep 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311985095

Will Berkeley

I am a Boston based fiction writer. I used to be a black belt in Tae Kwon Do which I earned from Billy Blanks before Tae Bo made him famous. That black belt was stolen along with my mountain of martial arts weapons in a break-in. You didn't hear about it on the news because I wasn't home. Never too late to roll weapons especially on crooks that steal black belts. What the hell! You can take everything else. You didn't earn that. Avi is me. Chris Sargent Photography credit.

Book preview

SPENT NATION

Published by Will Berkeley

Copyright 2015 Will Berkeley

Chapter 10: The End

-Fuck fuck fuck.

-Fucking hell you’re getting what you fucking want.

-You’re fucking saying it too. We’re trying to elevate it to the poetic.

-Who gives a blue hue fuck? We do it sex like. Just for us.

I flick a butt from a generic bell bottom nice price cigarette out the box window of my aged rusty bucket red Jeep into the crazy air streams of the Hollywould freeway. Real wind. Fake phony bonny Trucker Caveman car Sceni Cruiser bus created wind. I cough my lungs alveoli aching. Smoking is a foul retro old school forefather’s American habit. Through the rearview I see the butt dance spinning flying burning blue red bright gold fountain like but mostly baked potato brown. All in one blue barrel generic cigarette butt stump. Imagine that. I try putting the sandy thousands of year old Death Valley desert or even the inky blinky of Las Vegas in my mind but a variety of tired out dated thoughts about Hollywould creep up. My mind bottoms out. I’m twenty three. I never did anything other than what the Aging Parents at the Controls told forced coerced me to do with this life. Hissing hissing hissing I suck air through the gap cricking crack in between my two chipped front coffee tobacco Hollow purple Popsicle wine stained teeth. I’m trying to cultivate a nervous insidious ticking quiver. Make that a shoddy symbol. I stop. Concentrating on the free or high way. I fear crashing in a fiery red hot smoking like a cup of Joe jumping coffee java wreck as I’m fleeing Hollywould because of dumb stupidity. I have to do something worthwhile swim for myself my very own personal yes I own it naked swim race before I die. Maggie and I grafted together like a hybrid acid rained upon I taste heavy metal not that stupid kind. I mean the other iron in this Super Fund tomato since college. Both of us packed up the Caveman our Jeep to the scaly gills in front of our idyllic egalitarian brick bastard of. Sigh. Technicolor discouraging Education on the Eastern Seaboard. We kissed our College Loans good bye. Shook hands with our Aging at the Controls Parents. Tossed a worn out cassette into the worn out tape deck. Headed out West on the duvetyn worm to the less than idealistic pursuits of Hollywould. Holly would do anything to pay her rent. She’s a Robot Babe. Every year a Westward migration like ours occurs and typically ends in Venice. If you don’t know Mr. Big Deal Holly would do him. Like Maggie and I you usually turn it around and crawl crab swim back paddle sooner feels better than later to where ever you plus yours came from. About six months later it’s foul or big hair weather. Big time or crushed. Maggie and I fouled. Stood at a crotch roads in Venice. Not one demon at our particular crotch roads but three crocheting. Two Fast Food Bacteria Boxes and one Quickie Mart. Quickie Mart wasn’t hiring so we flipped a coin with fore fathers with funny hair on one side. I lost indeed found myself donning a paper hat. Dropping hairs in the food at the E. Crack Colic Bacteria Box. Maggie’s humble prize. A paper hat shape of a howdy cowboy hat. She looked quite fetching with all her hair in a fish net plumbing. Fetching fish fingers from the depths of an American fryer. It was kind of absurd rather ordinary self-sacrifice. Truly we had not an option between us. Both Maggie and I had been fired drop kicked don’t ever come back from a number of cafes restaurants studios films temp jobs you name it. Black list is what they call it in Holly town. The Bacteria Boxes were the only place we could still get hired in a greasy finger snap. Nobody knew us or our reputation. Walk to work. I love to walk. Only losers walk in Hollywould. Failing in Hollywould with defiance. It’s so easy just walk around style pursues you. Maggie and I fought a lot about who had to buy the mid-day meal. Lounge lunch. Seeing as one of us always got free food discounts and the other had to pay full tag meal deal. This only lasted two weeks. In the end we met at the Quickie Mart for mid-day snarf and smoked nice price blue barrel variety butts. We quit our jobs yesterday before we went insane got fired or died of some strange embarrassing colicking disease. Plus we have an apartment waiting for us in New York City. Spent Lee my only friend and one time next door neighbor in Venice is half Mr. Black Sheep and half Pa Silver Spoon. Any fool can eat sniff snarf anything off a spoon. The Preposterous Preppy. All the trapping from Boarding School to I seem to have sniffed my entire pay check. Again. Spent Lee and I went to college together yet we never knew each acknowledged said

-Who the fuck are you my brother?

Until fate maybe greed shit us unemployed over educated onto the streets of Venice after graduation. Greedy poverty the great equalizer. The Preposterous Preppy likes drugs roller blades snakes the film business. I just like the roller blading. We skated together. He brought his pet boa. Wrapped it around his neck. What a curious roller blading embarrassment. The Preposterous Preppy might have been my friend. He is definitely a Venice lifer. Belongs like a three legged dog. No offense tripod Dido the Fido. Spent Lee drove out from the East to be with a girl he slept with on occasion back at school. During their first air condition less Venice summer together she realized she could get better jobs plus air conditioning by poke poke poking the Agent. Holly would. Spent Lees other claim to fame. Acting. Critics wrote bundles of praise. At the cast parties he was always half naked with his snake. Both of them pissing on the floor. The Preposterous Preppy’s dimwitted drug alcohol stupor someday might end. His acting career everybody says is primed to spore fief feis pop. Gong banging on M. no love T.V. something like that. The last time I saw The Preposterous Preppy he tried to sell me some compact discs to buy drugs. That’s how I’ll remember the skinny spent freak even if he does become America’s next dimwit black hole. I mean star. And he will. Maggie and I lived in a two bedroom with another guy. Really a donut. We couldn’t afford to live alone. Justy our roommate couldn’t afford to throw us out. Lovely combination. It was the kind of place that you had to watch where you put your bare toes. Woof woof woof. A regular cat dog litter box. An ail a minute donut

-My this hurts. My that hurts. I changed my mind. It just hurts.

Looks like a hot dog vendor or a Michelin man in clothes. A stack of donuts. Aside from being a failed actor from the Midwest he secretaries one day a week. Don’t feel sorry for the donut. He commutes comfortably in a car he won on a game show. Incidentally he made a living as a perennial contestant on game shows. There are even professional game show donuts today. Justy and Spent Lee are the only friends Maggie and I have in Hollywould. A Michelin man from the Midwest and a Preposterous Preppy. Hollywould at best is a teary eyed port. Boo hoo good bye. Maggie and I planned our escape for the past month. We took the Bacteria Box Jobs saved money. Tonight we packed up the Caveman. Maggie kissed the donut. I said

-From both of us.

With enough pyramids and Presidents for first and last month plus some fun along the way I’m driving us to crabby New

-This red delicious is too expensive

York wondering why like so many a merry cans I thought that Holly would offer more than a Fill

-Her up handsome

Station back East. Pumping gas is a decidedly dying endangered art. There are too many Self

-Do it yourself pal

Serve Stations. I can’t see how the Aging Parents at the Controls expects us to scrap spill along. New Jersey hangs in there as the last state with mandatory Full Serve Stations. Go figure. Coffee gas generic cigarette futures on the American Stock Exchange rising. Hollywould diminishes in the rearview. Maggie says

-Good bye itchy rash. Say good bye Dirt.

-I’m going back.

-Have fun.

Maggie sits in the passenger seat of the Caveman and furiously knits. I’ll need the red wool handmade sweater when we arrive in New York City. Knitting gives her something to do. It’s different. It’s special. And Maggie makes it herself. I just sit behind the wheel at my meager Controls and talk a lot interesting to common place shit to myself. The whole scene feels pretty domestic pat ass patriarchal. My woman with all these shiny metal pins twisting turning knotting creating a sweater for her man out of a ball that some lousy cat gets claws stuck in. I make a few of the more universal gestures for sex in the air. I say

-I like this picture me driving and you poke poke poke poking away over there passenger side with your needles to keep me warm it feels

Maggie interrupts my speech by poke poke poke poking me in the crotch with one of her matriarchal needles ending my pontificating on the orthodoxy of our sitting drive knitting situation. While I sit feeling glum faced mum slightly less than pinching ass pat patriarchal. Maggie says

-Start digging it dude.

Meaning I better start enjoying the drive. The reality of the driving matter is simple. Maggie never drives because her license is suspended. Cop ate it. Maggie owes a few thousand dollars in speeding parking and I don’t know whatever other fines the Cops created. The big belly bandit wanted in five states. Maggie says

-I do better on public transportation.

Contrary to popular belief though she has all our bones. More of our green dead fore father Press You Dent pyramids with eyes at the top belonged to her before they became homely couple in other words ours. Mostly Maggie finances The Caveman plus Contents Cross Cumfry Oddity Sight Sea into the heart up to sniff the contradictory crotch of it Part Two. I love sequels. Especially if I never saw the first one. In the past nine months we drove twenty thousand miles. Every spare dead Press You Dent and free moment in between jobs we packed up the Caveman and headed out to some mishap ad hoc venture. One hundred miles out of Lost Again and my Bone screams

-Stop or I’ll get you.

In spite of my adventurous bend. You didn’t tell me I’d feel this old at my age. I suffer from a repetitive motion commotion disturbing disorder. From all the driving. The Caveman is a good just say howdy with it and it’s a happy friend but among his many inadequacies cruise Control he holds in highest esteem. Not having cruise Control acts as a shoddy Caveman defense or presage mechanism. The Caveman is a static beast caring not for motion. His favorite gear equals park. He likes being up on blocks dripping a rainbow array of colored fluids even better though. One result of our relationship is a sharp pain at the top of my gas pedal axle. You axed so I’m going to tell all. There is a point where as the song should go your ass is connected to your leg bone. At that very connection my leg throbs hot pulsating porno graphic beats. I’d fear I have cancer. Except Americans always think they have cancer. To add inflammation to injustice the stint in Hollywould damaged my body weight. My bottom shrank from the size of a soup bowl to a British tea hold the crumpets cup which gets altogether too close to no butt. Maggie on the other hand put on a few L.B.Js. Pounds with jowls pinned to them in Hollywould. Poverty shrinks me and has the opposite effect on Maggie. The other day Maggie looked down at her belly and said

-I’m sad. I’m getting really fucking fat. My stomach sticks out further than my breasts.

I said

-Eat some macaroons you’ll feel better Nora.

-Maybe I should run away. I need the exercise my pet.

The first stop out of Hollywould is Death Valley it’s not so dead it’s full of campers roasting weenies in the National Park. We often take lesser traveled roads like Frosty Bob which does one of a few irritating things. Gets us lost robbed we run out of gas or we have some kind of ad hoc venture. The nice thing about the desert outside of Death Valley I never feel lonely. I hate being alone. Cruising over those two lane dusty desert roads all by yourself you start feeling sorry for number one because you’re out there all alone. In other words you’re a loser nobody likes you. Then you get that soft squishy feeling of comfort. You realize you’re not alone. Someone likes you. Underground thousands maybe millions of G.I. bros the Hoe sow good fences make good neighbors variety hang out. Crunching the back out of a Government Issue easy boy office lounger tax dollars bought this chair. Little green dollar bill the color of money Bureaucrats. Those clever G men down in their holes talking about bombs making bombs eating out of shiny metal cans listening looking sniffing for extraterrestrial life in the universe. They covered the National potato. Disguised it. But it’s underground baking. Nobody will sneak up on A Merry Federal Bureau Crate eating out of a Government Issue Tin Can. I find it all too forth coming as I wiggle my Bone trying to find some yet undiscovered soft nook niche padded spot to put the noisy Bone bastard in. While driving down the empty road on top of one of these paranoid Government underground outposts of the American scream. I start to think of the good old days. Of earlier Americans the Forty Miners. Forty Thieves with a singular open sesame one liner must have beat a good ride out of asses on this very road in the pursuit of gold whiskey and whores. Nostalgia the wily pervert. As I’m pondering a few things I realize the everything is was will probably never be right in this world for me feeling laps over me. I have this feeling when my hangovers wake me up in the morning. At this moment it pounds me snoring like a fog air horn honking bellowing on a New England shore. My Bone throbs. Worse the feeling full body quiver vibrates. I run down the checking bouncing cheeks list. I need gas. I wish someone. No another society paid for gas not me. The gas gauge I dismiss immediately. I always need gas and I strapped a tin gas can to the spare flat bald tire. The Caveman isn’t overheating. I changed the thermostat after the last trip. All gauges appear to be proper hormonal boring normal. Maggie sits knitting with a head lamp. She wears a miners light in the Caveman at night so she can read knit or smoke Pot the pipe while I drive. She notices me looking at her. She smiles. Smiling as in all cultures is in ours regarded as a favorable sign. Even the homey homely domestic Cro Magnon couple in a Caveman fails to drive this full body hair standing at attention everything is not right in this world feeling away. I start fumbling with the Atlas maps. Lost again. Boom. A deafening sound. A door slamming in the sky claps animating the dark above our heads. I slow down the Caveman to a near halt. Hang my head out the box shaped window. Continuing to drive. Another one of my bad driving habits which contributes to my howling Bone disorder plus possibly bad posture too. The hot eye ball drying desert air rushes around my head dangling out the window box. Barbigerous the beard plus frayed rope hair swirl like seaweed on a stormy shore. Two big black jets race out of sight as I reel my head back through the window picking a few beard hairs out of my mouth. Terror. Danger danger danger. Knitting knots of stomach dread. I say

-Do you think they’re filming some picture about jet fighters and lovely Robot Babes? You know Maggie they fall in love and fly off?

I try to be funny but I need to pee badly. I always drink a water tower of Adam Ale in the Caveman because heat comes up through the floor boards hard boiling my eye pupil balls. Maggie looks up and splashes me in the face with a bucket of candle power from her miner lamp lighted head. She pops a cigarette into her yap smoking trap. Flash the flame rises. Returning to her knitting. Smoking knitting while I stand by driving waiting. If you road trip a lot with someone conversations take a few miles to play out. Tap tip shapely rap. Tapping my foot on the gas pedal. The lurching starts to even bother me. Maggie peers up again blinding me for the second time with her mining helmet lamp lighted head. She looks like a ghoul. Hair and head lamp. She says

-You fucked up.

I hate that. I have to pee twice as badly. Nothing worse than being angry plus having to pee at the same time. I slam on the brakes stopping the Caveman in the middle of the road and jump out. Leave him idling. I never turn the Caveman off if I plan on driving him again soon. He never restarts without all kinds of cajoling curse grinding. Mechanical I don’t thinks so. Purely personal. I work on him myself all the time he just refuses to go on. The Caveman’s old ancient elder grumpy. The bastard should be retired to a spare parts Zen pasture by now. Maybe the Caveman has a few mechanical problems to compliment the personal ones. It looks like a steaming burn your tongue off brothy frothing stew under the hood. Most of his parts are

-We the Dealer. Arm and Hammer of the Corporation. God as our Witness highly recommend you don’t put those parts in.

I went to the Corporation until Christ Sir bought Jeep cheap. The bastards. To the Corporation I went to buy a bolt. Dolt said

-That’ll be four-fifty son.

I said

-Christ Sir four fucking and a half dead Press You Dents for a bolt?

-That is a recommended bolt in the palm of your hand. Today it costs four dollars and fifty cents. Tomorrow more. Customers with bigger orders and cleaner