Hello Devilfish! (5 page)

/ 12 /

What doesn't kill you almost kills you—Hello Devilfish! Today class, we're gonna deconstruct the cancer narrative—it's gnarly chemo fun! Jeez, I hate these sappy fables where Betty finds a breast lump and becomes—a better person! Hah—what she actually morphs into is a chop-shop freak—with a narrative woven from very wooly clichés. Hope it keeps her toasty—who's gonna date some hag with one fun bag? These god-awful cancer books frost my balls—all these slipshod tomes about battling for your teensy life—with an uplifting message! Listen, fighting the Big C is like wrestling a freight train—
I approached the diesel beast like a friend, not an enemy. Maybe it had something to teach me—a lesson in love and laughter? Or maybe how to rip a skull into screaming paste.
Hello Stage 4! All your squamous are ours. Who cares about your spiritual journey—how enlightened was that bacon you scarfed at breakfast? Maybe Mr. Pig thought that slaughterhouse hook was gonna lift him to heaven too. A heaven filled with knives and bright screams—Hello Devilfish!

Lover, you're not my lover, shhh. Never give up on our hopes and dreams. But for sure give up on trouncing Squidra—she was in manic chaos mode. My chaos, mine! Though hopefully some Stryker jets would make puréed calamari from her ginormous butt any second. Hey, it ain't the 1950s—you bipeds can pretty much snuff
anything
. Except a Hello Devilfish! Who'd probably better skedaddle—'cause here they come! Three stealth bombers that slice night into sonic pasta—and then plop like graphite meatballs when Squidra zaps them with her orange eyeball lasers, bzzrt, bzzrt, her suckers pulsing like firefly swarms, her tentacles lashing out like a pink asterisk. Whoa! I can haz death burger?

Cool—could Squidra actually pull this off? Could she wreak total Armageddon? Let's hear more twinkly noises! As smacked hotels shred into glass flak under Squidra's FX tentacles—grrr, grrr—she's stealing my rampage! Mine! Hmmm—so why am I standing here like a dazed popsicle while doom and mayhem rain around me? Um, 'cause wherever I am is where doom and mayhem reign. 'Cause eeek—a chubby squid is after me! Just me. Honest. Plus fucko—she just spotted me again! I can tell by her goofy grin. “Here, Demon Fish,” she coos and
schlump—schlump—schlump
oozes closer till I feel her septic breath. “That's bizarre,” she sniffs me, “you're a walker—but you
smell
like him. Explain.”

Hah—could I ever explain her whack passion? I doubt it—I left my DSM-VI at home. But maybe Squidra
was
my fated mate—what was that my mom used to screech?
You get the spouse you deserve—now help me devour your father
. She yelled that right after she bit daddy's head off, him thrashing like a tased frog, all us stingray spawns lapping up his muddy blood—memories, memories. Whee! I'm a thing you should rub. A lot. While I'm on my back. No, lower—hah—as low as me crawling through a drainpipe right now. Why? 'Cause evil Squidra's on my trail! I got a date with death—and death's a total porker. “Come here, leetle changeling,” Squidra tosses riprap at my drainpipe to ferret me out—eeek! Uh oh—am I headed like my whipped dad for an undersea buffet? Or even worse—torrid nooky? “Hey—hey
you
,” Squidra blocks my drainpipe escape with her slinky tentacles, “why you smell like my boyfriend?”

“I'm not your boyfriend—
geeraa
!” I scream what should be napalm spit—but just drools out like bum juice. “Aha,” Squidra's oozy eyeball seals my drainpipe, “it
is
you! You've turned into a toy!”

“We don't want you playing with us,” I scuttle back asswards.

“You're
shrunk
,” she slips a tentacle around me.

“Um no, ma'am—you're mistaken—no Devilfishes here,” I hug pipe rust, “Mr. Stingray died. He dead! Big time fun dead!”

“I dunno,” she peers closer, “you sure talk like him. Same dumb Manglish crap.”

“He—he's gay! Eeep,” I squeak when she squeezes me. “That's why I smell like him! We did the naxty in the sauna. Happy prick invasion life!”

“No way he's gay,” Squidra giggles, “not with
his
grooming. You seen his ear hairs? They're longer than surfboards.”

“If you hate him so much,”—why am I arguing with a fish?—“then why you stalking him?”

“Love is mysterious,” Squidra coos.

“No it ain't!
Geeraa!
” I screech like a jailed mynah, “plus he hates you! Icky girl, icky!”

“You're a feisty changeling,” Squidra squints closer—ewww, I can even see her slimy chin wrinkles. “But how'd you turn human? Wait—we were near some bio-factory—goddamn it,” she bitches when a rogue fire truck bonks her fin, “don't these fuckers ever stop?” They do when she slaps that truck into the guzzling sky—and hee hee, drops me onto that gore-slicked street. “Bye!” I laugh, skittering knees and hands across a squid-wracked wasteland. What—I should stick around and fight—with this useless human bod? Hah—if fate will slay me, why, fate may chase my blue butt. Hello Devilfish! I got nothing to add.

/ 13 /

Look—I really, really want to end Big Lit. I'm not kidding—join our censor lifestyle! It's called Censor Life. But how to really, really end Lit? Every time you harass the wordy sucker—it co-opts you! You go slasher, sexist, gross-out, nonsensical—the meta-narrative simply
absorbs
you. I never met a narrative I didn't hate. Next thing you know, some beardy dude is using
you
as a plot!
Ahem, yes—my new book's about a poem-hating stingray
.
He's a sensitive little putz.
Here's what I've tried—you tell
me
if it worked. Crush presses, gulp pulp mills, chow down authors and critics? Lit goes ebook and mob democratic—now everyone's a writer! With vague and boring needs. And don't get me raving about gender skirmishes—dude writers were dumb enough—now we got a billion chicks picking their memory scabs!
My sex-ed teacher ignored me. Grandpa spurned my bondage forays.
Chicks live in the past like cranky fossils—Hello Devilfish! I'm big fun in a small can.

Anyway, the skinny is I dodged raging Squidra by sprinting through some foundry prefecture, this pomo maze of smokestacks and girders and incomprehensible pictographs squirming on torn ads. This was def a Buraku district—everywhere stank from fish butts and despair. What are Buraku? They're Japan's untouchables—the caste that for millennia burned corpses and slaughtered pigs and ate all the carp guts. Tokyoites call them
sluckers
—don't ask how
that
slur arose—and only a gaijan like me would even admit they exist. Who cares? Let them figure their own karma out—I was blue and needed pants. I looked like a Level 3 Smurf pedophile.

Let's have the pop reference! Truth be told—and it won't—I was still more ray than human in my morphed biped mind. For starters, I couldn't really walk—staggering like a drugged shark don't count—and I still wiggled my arms like fish wings. Nothing to see here, folks—just another blue rube doing the funky chicken. I can haz James Brown? And then—ahem—there's the power line incident. Which went down when I lurched and keeled through goofy streets and nearly tripped on
duhn duhn duhhhhh
—some downed power lines! Sizzling and writhing in voltaic knots. More of Squidra's oeuvre, no doubt—us kaiju love to plow through watt towers, amp cables, cathode clots—anything that squirms like ghost ramen when you wreck it. Plus some voltage poles were still standing! Almost as crooked as me when I ran at those dangling wires—force of habit, gotta smash them—waggling my arms and screaming my cute lungs out.
Geeraa
! I think I woke maybe a half hour later with black sparks tattooed across my chest. “Blue mansu, blue mansu,” some meter maid shook me, “you alright?”

“Get lost,” I snarled and lurched up. And what's with the
blue mansu
? Oh right—my skin.
Blue Mansu Group
is this Tokyo lounge trio that smear their heads with cerulean goo and play jazz marimbas—I swear I almost heard them in my scorched eardrums. So that's it—really? I can't even eat simple voltage anymore? Wah—why is the world against me? I just wanna kill it—and maybe get some pants. Which was mondo easy—I just found a wrecked alley and stripped the nearest Squidra victim who didn't poop his drawers. Plus I copped a cool aloha shirt too—I've always wanted to smear Honolulu back into the roiling sea. I can haz nice Hawaiian Punch?

Maybe a soggy mac-salad plate too—I was that famished. It was minutes since I last ate—and us Devilfish need mass grub. So what do these humanoids chow down on, anyway? They ain't devoured each other for centuries. Luckily—or un—my new monkey nostrils drew me into this gigantor fish mart. Which wasn't even panicked about looming Squidras yet—Tokyoites learned decades ago to work around whatever Gamera or US Air Force Corps rained death on their ducking skulls. Nope, they just kept on gutting trout and slurping eels—even as her whopping tentacles smeared the horizon into cement scrapple. Still, crowding into that fish bazaar
would
be pretty dumb. Yep—that'd be me, staggering into that packed perch mall, elbowing geezers and fishwives aside—and plunging my snout into a cart of butchered hake. “Yum,” I chewed up scales and gills that crackled like martyred locusts—till I'm yanked from my gory banquet! “Get out of here, thief!” some fishmonger raised his cleaver.

“What you gonna do,” I giggled, “eat me?”

“Stealing! You're stealing!”

“Sheesh, calm down,” I snatched a huge hake up, “or I'll have to fish-slap you.”

“Evil blue gaijan—go away!” he hissed. Good thing I didn't know my own strength—cause it sucked! I could barely tap him with that clumsy hake. But I did muster enough entropic motion to smack my hand into his blurring cleaver—which chopped off my pinky! “You're kidding,” I stared at the gushing stump, “
red
blood?”

“I'll kill you—thief!” he raised that glinting cleaver again! While that thronged market chanted “Thief—thief—” and I did some quick math. Hmmm, let's see—Squidra to the south, lethal monger to the west—better head east. Where? To the slums and hovels where the ragged stingrays go. Hello Devilfish! Won't you take me to Buraku town?

/ 14 /

Let's looking for tropes! Mwah ha ha—today I'll infest this hoary abolitionist potboiler called
Uncle Tom's Houseboat
. With a Grade-A silly plot starring halibut slaves and incomprehensible massas. Seems what the Yankees really stole was their consonants—
I doan' know nothin' about birthin' no perch
! Anyway, our tale opens with Hammerhead Legree dragging a gigantor slave fish to de auction block. It's Mama Stingray! She ripples with calico fat. “Please,” she moans, “forsake to sell us down that fetid river.”

“Mwah ha ha,” Simon rubs his fins, “we's gwine to sell you
an'
yo baby ray—bring that buck fish in heah.”

“Oh Mother!” I wail, twisting my chains and punching my gigantor blue tail through a mast. “Dear matriarch,” I weep flaming snot, “they shall sell my precious bod!”

“My God,” some tuna matron sniffs, “can't that ray-tard say
anything
in patois?”

“Hurry up with dis piscine oppression!” Hammerhead Legree spits tobacco juice at Mama Stingray. Why not? She's a dead thing on paper like me—Hello Devilfish! Whoa—enough of that tripe. Instead, let's zoom back ahead to right now Tokyo—where I'm nauseous and totally dizzy. From hunger, boredom, disgust, ennui—and probably also major blood loss. Fucko—human pinkies hold a
ton
of blood. Poor Devilfish, your problems are not gorgeous. Let's soothe you with rich deceit. I'd settle for a fried Spam-wich—the raptured stench from a kajillion fast food kiosks was driving me nuts. But even I had enough sense not to rob another fish mart—I'm too easy to pick out. For starters, I'm the wrong shade—the dusky stranger, the jay in a canary flock, a blue 2-ball in a rack of yellow 9s. Plus a bloody hand seems to upset folks. Who veered away from me hissing “Blue Mansu” or “Dumb aloha shirt” or “Hello Gaijan!” Let's have an electrolyte crisis!

Who knows how long I stumbled around in a hem-atomic haze? I barely remember dirty streets and hick limbs smacking into my dizzy parade. Plus for some odd reason, two dancing bull dogs. Hello Disassociation! It's a bargain between meat and distress—and pain, yeeouch! Now I know what it feels like when I toast humans—eeek, take it away, take it away! I should be dealing death, not feeling it. But ain't this where I get empathetic, rueful, guilty, sobbing with fun regret for eons of nihilistic ease? Dream on, suckers—the only thing I learned was—don't cut off your fingers! Or stick them too far up your nose, ewww. But I def gotta learn to use these new digits—these devious hands are what make you apes lethal. What else could make anthrax and quiche on the same day? Anyway, I finally collapsed on some filthy stairs under a sputtering neon sign for
Prawn Gut Surprise Cafe
. OK, I smell the prawn guts—but where's the surprise? Mine was this beatific face noodling through my delirium. “You're hurt!” it chirped, “wow—you're totally discolored from blood loss.”

“Do you like the song ‘Urgent'
?
” I babbled. “
Urgent, so urrrrrrgent
—”

“I'm a doctor—” that chucklehead cooed, “I can
help
.”

“Thanks,” I moaned, “that's mighty blue of you. Hello Devilfish!”

“Hmmm—shock setting in—no time,” and he picked me up—me! Picked up by a biped! And then toted up raw stairs and into a hallway all stanky from kimchee and cats. He was caring for a complete stranger! This clod was dumber than a drunk slug—he even dragged me into a bathroom and slathered me with Bactine and gauze. I'm sure I asked “Is this really your home?” before I bit half his neck off and dropped his dead ass. Hey, he had an apartment—and I needed one! Especially one with cupboards chocked with box-flavored food. At least I didn't eat
him
—or not yet. Instead I gorged on Wheat Thins and stale donuts—both are superb—while inching away from his gushing bod. Ha ha, doctor man—that'll teach you to help weird drifters—Hello Devilfish! We starve in your dumb applause.

Anyway, then I stuffed his gouged neck with a dish towel, plopped him in a closet and watched some TV. It's how us gangstas do our bling thang! We're obviously total morons. But even worse than rerun sitcoms or sadistic game shows—my fave was
Win Prizes or Neuralgia
—all the TV news was about Squidra! My jealousy is buttery hot. Tokyo was
my
playground—mine! Whoa—I gotta figure a way to morph back into a gigantor rapacious Hello Devilfish. And also maybe learn to use these stupid hands—I'd already bought two Datsuns by mistake. How? By banging away on Mr. Dead Doc's laptop—which I found glowing on his kitchen table. How do you work this loony device? Probably
not
by hitting the wrong key with your pinky stump—that just surfed me into a diaper porn site. Wah! Hey, I couldn't use my other hand 'cause it was mostly down my zipper—mmmm. Join us in hot pants languor! Thus spake Hello Devilfish.