Crime Gene

[blp]

When I grow up I’m going to have a train set that goes all around the room. The network of tracks is going to be very complicated and in between there will be realistic buildings and hills.
I’m also going to have a giant balloon that will be completely silver and will float at the top of the room all the time.
I’m going to have a giant swimming pool with water slides all around it and a fountain and rocks surrounding it and a high diving board. There will be women with big breasts everywhere.
It’s going to be at the top of a big hill with the sun on all the time and trees all around. Nobody will be able to see in and we’ll have big orgies every day. We can also watch movies inside whenever we want. There will be the Wizard of Oz and Abba videos and also some rude films for grownups. Everybody will eat cheeseburgers and pizza. Also inside I’ll have an indoor go-karting track and there will also be a big slide from the top of the house to the bottom. All the women will want to go to bed with me, so I’ll have a very big bed with a built in television and video. Also, some of them will be in a rock band and they will have giant concerts with explosions and fake mutilation effects.
All of the most famous writers and artists will want to come over and also film stars.

When I am thirteen I will be a famous comic book artist. Because I am so young I will be part of a special club for child prodigies with two other boys who are very good at science and mathematics respectively and also Brooke Shields who is a very good actress. The other two won’t be as interesting as me because they are only science boffins, so Brooke and I will fall in love and I will be very cool, smoking cigarettes and always in tight black clothes. We will all hang out in mostly empty hotels and me and Brooke will keep going off for snogs and have sex in airplane toilet cubicles and swimming pools and things like that. We will have a special understanding.

Age fifteen I am going to move out of my home and into a cool squat with all my best friends and doing nothing but playing punk rock records and reading books by Dostoyevsky and Beckett and Jean Paul Sartre and I will have a great girlfriend who looks like Marie Osmond. She will be exceptionally cool and just barely tolerate all my other friends who are mainly not as mature as me. We will have a perplexing relationship as far as other people are concerned, able at times to communicate quite nonverbally, with just a look, at times having raging arguments and smashing things. We will go on wild country rambles in our punky, designer clothes and visit sites of interest around Britain and have a wide circle of acquaintances comprising terrorists, football hooligans, drug dealers, heroin addicts, punk rock musicians, writers and television personalities. We will got to France and meet Gilles Deleuze by chance who will become our great friend and have us to stay with him in Paris all the time where we will all drop acid and become animal. Later he will write a book about that time that he will say was as important to his thought as reading Nietzche. He and my girlfriend will have sex once and I won’t mind as it will only be a thought experiment and an expression of their deep intellectual respect for one another. We will also be close friends with Dan Graham and everyone in Sonic Youth. We will hang out in art galleries a lot having increasingly oblique discussions about objecthood and implicit textuality. We will be asked to model and host television programmes and write articles for the Guardian, but we will refuse all these offers, preferring a life of crime.

[rachel]

Well as a lbr't woman who is always self conscious about it I can say that hanging around that kid's pool would be at the very least a rollercoaster ride. I would wear three sets of clothes, one on top of the other and carry a weapon.
Honestly I have rarely laughed so hard, ever. It was so right on with the ages of kids I have worked with that are in trouble or at risk. And they sit there and like I am their pal tell me this stuff in detail. You could fry eggs on my face.
I always marvel that with so much in one's brain that well is not anything most aspire to personally even if we have thought up some of it- I always wonder how we in fact ever disengage ourselves from our rambling unbelievable thoughts to work out who we in fact are and reach for something noble in life.The person you described there is a text book trust bandit that I have worked with many times and they so love the dark, criminal, in your face world that most of them never willingly leave it. It is far too intoxicating.
What awesome imagery though, what a mind I very much love your style, your insight into the human being and your way of evoking a movie as I read along.

[TodHackett]

blp--

Truly awesome stuff here. I can see why you say you "need a voice". Of course, there are several grammar issues here, but of course, that is the voice you are speaking through and you do it masterfully. This passage reminds me of the letters in the first chapter of West's _Miss Lonelyhearts_. If you haven't read it already, I'd recommend it.

I'm curious to know how this piece is framed. Is this a sketch or part of a larger work? If it's part of a larger work, then how is this passage incorporated into it? Is it simply a passage from a book in first-person? Is it a first-person narration in a third-person book? Is this part of a journal? If so, under what circumstances is it being read, and by whom?

Your brief soliloquy has left me wanting to know more... which I guess makes you a good writer.

[Pensive]

blp, it is really touching. I am not good in critical stuff (and it is needed in reviewing someone's writing) but I appreciate it a lot.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

You have real talent blp. This is great stuff. No time to comment more just now - I'll be back.

[Scheherazade]

blp,

Just had a quick read and I think it reads very nicely. However, couple of questions for you:

-Who is the persona speaking in the story? I am assuming he is a child aged 10 or so? If so, the language and grammar seem a little too complicated for that age.

-A child of that age would dream of orgies and 'women with big breasts' and some other activities listed?

- Over all, I think there are other confusions of this sort. He sounds like a 8-9 year old at times and others 16-17 year old. I can understand how children are able to copy the 'grown ups' around them but their grammar is always a big give away (and he didn't even once say 'like...' ;))

- Which decade is this supposed to written? If present, I wonder if today's children would know some of these names? If 80s or so, is it by any chance a personal account? ;)

It is a chilling and thought provoking read. Me likey. :)

I will re-read it again later on!

[blp]

Thanks for all replies and the generally quick and positive response.

Rachel - interesting to know real kids out there are echoing this kind of stuff. Poor little tykes.

Tod, I see it as a piece in itself, not part of a longer work, though at one point I did think of slotting it into the novel I was writing. Wouldn't have been a very comfortable fit, though.

Scher, a lot of the confusion you highlight is intentional. I suppose I'm reluctant to say why and have been reluctant to respond because I was curious to see if anyone 'got' why - not that it's any big puzzle, so I won't make a big deal of it. The idea is to sort of merge childish fantasies with those of someone older, to pull the rug out from under what might seem more legitimate and even intellectual fantasies and identifications - with rock musicians, conceptual artists, philosophers - and notions of transgression and suggest that they may simply be the same childish fantasies - of a kind of complete self indulgence - in a trickier disguise. Oh dear - did that make sense?

[rachel]

blp,
that is why I thought it so fantastic and when I sit with the kids that will trust me as far as they dare-most have been detached thru abandonment and no longer trust anyone so they become ultimate cons and are thus called trust bandits.
You nailed it right on the head because the very fact those poor people have managed to survive thru the hell they have(and as I went thru it I totally understand) because they have they have no trouble believing a montage of thoughts like that can come true because well they are still here are they not.
I wouldn't touch it. It is SO real and rips at the heart in a real way. Any messing with it would make it'sanitized' and not how the trust bandits really talk and think.
You just keep amazing me. honest.

[Pensive]

blp,

Just had a quick read and I think it reads very nicely. However, couple of questions for you:

-Who is the persona speaking in the story? I am assuming he is a child aged 10 or so? If so, the language and grammar seem a little too complicated for that age.

-A child of that age would dream of orgies and 'women with big breasts' and some other activities listed?


I agree with Scher there. He is a very young child of 10 or 11 and his grammer is very good and on some places, he sounds like a child of 8 or 9 but I think that it is the nature of children that sometimes they try to copy their adults so this kid might have been copying adults for a long time.

He is an average kid, with all those kids who like freedom but he has expressed himself far better than a teen could have I mean that most of the children like their dreams to be shaped into reality but I have seen very few kids with expressions like his. The story reminds me of my childhood, which was quite different from this kid but very suitable on the last sentence: "we will refuse all these offers, preferring a life of crime" Children like to follow what they want. They don't care about rules and regulations because they are not so experienced. They just want freedom.

[rachel]

In the normal sense with children, ( I have cared for around a hundred, some as a registered nanny, some under the Ministry living in the home with abused, at risk and neglected little ones after their parents have been apprehended and with trust bandits which are the saddest) what Scher has suggested is true in my experience.
For the most part all the children I cared for spoke entirely age appropriate, but for some strange reason almost NONE of the true trust bandits did. I cannot explain it except to accept the fact that the people they were always around were adults and much older kids and they emulated them perfectly and were smooth and very convincing. It was only after getting to know them that one could detect the youngness of the child, even their faces at times were hard to tell age wise, because sorrow and abuse really ages the face.
So I still like it the way it is. But if the audience by large are going to question this then I would change the age of the language, but not its essence.

[Scheherazade]

I have worked with about 500 children up to this day I think (from 7-8 year-olds to late teens) and no matter how mature sounding they are, there are always great give aways. Maturity is not something one can fake, in my opinion.

After reading this again, I couldn't help but wonder whether the persona here is actually an adult looking back at his own childhood fantasies, which would explain the language problems and 80s references quite well. It would also explain why more adults sounding fantasies are entangled with childish ones. Something inside us never grows up, after all.

[blp]

So glad it touched a chord with you, Rachel and Pensive.

On the issue of who the speaker is, particularly how old, in a sense Scher's right to see it as an adult. I wrote it and I'm an adult. But to be very picky about it, it's not so much that this is a reminiscence as a confession about how I might be now. Rachel, I think you were referring to the surprising candour of these 'trust bandits' in talking about their fantasies - this is something that adults are less likely to be so honest about, but - this is the real point - that doesn't mean it's not still there. And the reason an adult would be less likely to talk about this kind of thing is that they know, rationally, that it's absurd and embarrassing and not true. So it was a kind of emotional experiment in saying this kind of thing out loud in order to get rid of it, to let its absurdity be seen in the cold light of day.

In another sense, it's fiction - the speaker is not real and he's neither an adult nor a child. And this is important to me because I'm trying to say that the childish fantasies may not have really gone away in adulthood and the adult fantasies were already sort of contained in the childhood fantasies.

[white camellia]

Do all 'your'(you big boy) dreams come true (as 'you' planned to)?

I had a brisky moment of reading your narration. I just wish I could write as well as you someday ... ;-P

[blp]

Do all 'your'(you big boy) dreams come true (as 'you' planned to)?
Almost none of them come true, White Cam. And the ones that do never live up to expectations. Be careful what you wish for!


I had a brisky moment of reading your narration. I just wish I could write as well as you someday ... ;-P
Pah. You ought to know perfectly well that you can - and in a language that isn't even your own.