If All Else Fails (13 page)

On the other hand,
maybe I am only showing you the soft underbelly of a stealing tide of nostalgia. Maybe I need a
new analogy.
^!

I am a
science-fiction writer, the mother impregnator of dreams. I reflect culture. Culture reflects me.
Why are both these statements true?

"Joanna Russ, and
we throw in some other kind of broad, I don't know who just yet, but we tear her clothes halfway
off and so she's got to look like she's asking for it, but what I mean we can maybe do," said
Peter Renoir, "is have these two broads, see, and this alien menace from somewhere, how the hell
I know, one of the damn planets or something. Are you with me on this?"

"Gotcha," said
Semina, licking the end of her pencil and scribbling it down on her napkin.

"Well see, my idea
for the series is first these two aliens come down and these two broads have one hell of a time
trying to escape from them. In the last ten minutes of the show, we burn this Russ's clothes off,
see, get some good leg shots going for us and maybe a couple good back shots, then the alien
catches her and rapes the hell out of her. We make that nine minutes and then cut away for the
commercial. We cut back for the final minute, in which it is revealed that the alien is really
working for the government. So the show ends on an upbeat note and we sell one hell of a lot of
product."

"But won't it get
stale? Don't you have to have a sad show once in a while, you know a downbeat one for a change of
pace?" asked Semina.

"You mean like
could we add something like a pet goat or something that gets killed off or a baby dog or
something?" asked Peter Renoir, mulling it over in his head.

His face lit up.
"Oh, man! It just hit me! It's a frigging natural! We come back next week and throw in this time
machine device, see, and she and this other broad gets thrown back into the past. Back to fifteen
hundred and forty-eight or whenever the hell the Civil War was. Do you see it! See, we have the
whole Confederate Army and the Union Army and Russ and this other broad lands in a Union town. We
kill off the other broad when the Rebels overrun the town. Then, see, we got the audience's
sympathy. We got their attention and then the Confederate Army catches Joanna Russ and rapes the
hell out of her. We do it in three versions, soft focus for television with lots of shots of
horses taken extra so we can cut them in, crotch closeups for the drive-in and for the big
downtown theater market, we got to shoot something symbolic or something. I don't know what,
maybe a picture of Orson Welles in the buff."

"It's going to be
beautiful," said Semina.

"Then see, the way
we end it is, the Union Army comes in and saves her."

"Then what
happens?" asked Semina.

"Then the Union
Army rapes the hell out of her and the picture ends and we are left with a sense of
loss."

"You're a frigging
genius 1" said Semina. "You really are, Peter."

"Oh, it was
nothing," said Peter Renoir. "But it damn well will sell."

NOTE TO THE READER:
l'LL BET THE EDITOR THINKS I DON'T CARE TOO MUCH FOR YOU. He's WRONG. PLEASE REMEMBER THE EDITOR
BEHIND HIS SMILE IS MY PIMP. I DO LOVE YOU VERY DEARLY AT EXACTLY FIVE CENTS A WORD. AND BECAUSE
I LOVE YOU, I'M GOING TO CLARIFY THINGS FOR YOU. I WANT EVERY­THING IN THIS STORY TO BE RIGHT
BETWEEN US.

ON PLOTTING THE
STORY:

The plot is simply
about an alien who has come into your bedroom, your life, your church. He has come seeking
knowledge, information. He is looking to the reader for that information. He is an alien and
doesn't care how he gets it. He wants information about doing it. Yes, he does. He is an alien
and he learned about your planet from watching tele­vision and going to the drive-in movies on
Saturday and Sunday nights. While the alien is very much in sympathy with the reader, while the
alien is very much on the reader's side, the alien cannot deny his personal feelings and values
as an alien, which is why his meaning may not be too clear. This is the story of his struggle in
your world to figure out how to do it.

In 1934 Clark Gable
took off his shirt and underneath he wasn't wearing an undershirt. The undershirt industry fell
off that year by 50 percent.

"Christ!" said
Peter Renoir. "When is this damn story going to finish up? I say we cut the hell out of the son
of a bitching thing. I say we muzzle the son of a bitch and get it over with. He isn't Screen
Guild anyway. Just because he wrote some stuff under the name of Rudyard Kipling do I have to
listen to the whole thing? I got things to do."

"But how the hell
we going to do it up without you got the whole picture?"

"I got the
picture," said Peter Renoir. "We take out Gunga Din and substitute Nanette Fabray. Don't tell me
I ain't got the picture!"

"Who we gonna get
to direct it?"

"How about we get
Gower Champion? I want someone who isn't going to mess it up by knowing anything."

"You're a genius,
Peter Renoir," said Semina.

"Yes, I know," said
Peter Renoir.

Semina tells a lie
and then tells the truth. There is no change in her face. She murders a stripper named Shirley
who wants to get married and have a baby. She murders a stripper who is not named Shirley and who
doesn't want to get married and would sell a baby if she could get anything out of it. There is
no change in her face.

She goes away for
the weekend with a bowling team sponsored by a local carwash. The inbuilt demand for a higher
standard of living creates a feeling of menace. The captain of the bowling team dies from heart
failure that may or may not have been caused by the bullet in his brain. Panic-stricken by this
turn of events, she decides to escape from this world. She buys a ticket and enters a movie house
to watch a double feature. The film ends and we are left with a sense of familiarity.

Peter Renoir is an
alien. He feels naked without his clothes. He equates morality with being uncomfortable.
If
only h
e were illiterate. We could save him if he were illiter­ate. The
ways of official literacy do not equip people to know themselves, the past or the
present.

Why doesn't Peter
Renoir understand as we understand? Why doesn't he know the world has been conquered? Don't you
understand? The world has been conquered. What have they done to the earth and the
people?

Who are they? I can
explain me. I am a creature of the nightland. I am of the soil. I am people. That is who I
am.

Who are they? They
are technology. They are the aliens. Technology is the creature of the conquered world. The
world, all my peoples, is the materials of technology, not its form.

The car did not do
the work of the horse. It replaced it. Technology will not do the work of the people. It will
re­place them.

Semina is arrested
for flaunting antisexual implications. Peter Renoir bails her out. They fall in love. They build
it up to a severe emotional disturbance. However, as they real­ize that they are at last
approaching a permanence and se­curity unknown to them and their generation, Peter Renoir finds
himself pursuing anticliche to anticlimax.

Semina catches him
kissing himself. He defends himself by casually remarking, "When sex dies it is
climax."

She snubs him in
the closing scene by proclaiming, "Others may call you sensibly adaptive but I think you are a
faggot."

The movie ends and
we are left without a sense.

"Semina," said
Peter Renoir, moving toward her in a zoom, up angle. "Why don't we do it?"

"You mean, uh, oh
dearest!" said Semina. "You've finally discovered the secret! After millions of miles and one
of
your smiles, you've finally found out
how to do it. I'm so proud of you!"

"Aw, shucks," said
Peter Renoir, blushing. "It wasn't nothing special. I just watched television until I found out
how they did it."

"Nevertheless,"
said Semina, "I'm impressed. How do we doit?"

"Well," said Peter
Renoir, blushing through every pore. "I believe the best way is for you to prop yourself up on
that couch over there. Kind of slouch around and blink your eyes a lot. Then light up a
cigarette."

"Then what?"
pole-vaulted Semina, arching enthusi­astically over his every word.

"Then," said Peter
Renoir, with dramatic emphasis and a slight snigger, "I leap on top of you, your hand will become
limp and the cigarette will drop to the floor. Later you will cry."

"Why don't we just
forget the whole thing?" said Semina.

I am an sf fanzine
editor. I am forty-nine years old and never have been kissed. I am a peeping torn, a chronic
mas-turbator. The mirror is my staff of life, my totem, my life's work. The window is my prey.
What is my threat? What is my power?

My secret is that I
am lonely and in that silence that sur­rounds me, I am able to pierce the windows with my mouth
and make an unknowing partner of anyone in my eyes' range. I am deeply involved in a current fan
project to cure blindness with a whore's spittle. My threat and my power is in my ability to
motivate, to "show the donkey the carrot."

MUTATIONS ARE ONLY
POSSIBLE THE MOMENT ONE GOES FROM ONE SET OF CONVENTIONS TO ANOTHER.

The science-fiction
editor, in order to play his game with a
full deck, is forced to accept only images that represent an orderly sequence. An image
path that is familiar. That is why science fiction sometimes repeats itself itself itself itself
itself itself itself and why this story will get thirty-five rejec­tion slips. An Indian tells
the story of his life from the day the world began. He will never tell his life's story with any
regard to chronology. He may work back or work forward or both. He will repeat himself many times
and omit things fre­quently. Shall I apologize for this pagan mysticism, the will­ful obscurity
about my craft? I want to withhold my skills from profane onlookers. I am, after all, repeating
the works of nature.

Peter Renoir and
Semina are hopelessly in love and they decide to kill each other. While on a visit to Renoir's
mother they decide to kill Mommy instead. Before they can carry it out, however, a semi-pro
football team, turned cannibal after losing their league franchise, attacks the house. Peter
Renoir is killed, as is his mother. Semina helps them eat the evidence of their intellectual
dilemma, nearly choking on Renoir's mother, who is tough and stringy. She joins the team as an
outside linebacker. She is later benched and then raped by a referee. The film ends in a closeup
on the fifty-yard line and we are left with a sense of loss.

From
Reviews in
Film
:

Only a director of
the stature of Peter Renoir could bring himself so consistently to face contemporary reality. The
determination to show only what is real is clearly an aspect of Renoir's wider determination to
expose himself com­pletely to the age in which we live. The scene in which an apple is stuffed up
Peter Renoir's anus in preparation for being butchered, cooked and eaten is an obvious attempt to
tell us that what we are watching is more than a film but instead the very framework of everyday
reality. At the end of the film, when the director allows us to actually see one of the corpses
breathing, we are once again assured in the di­rector's unshakable faith in the unconquerorable
human spirit.

Peter Renoir is
leaving his rich wife because he is too comfortable. Semina is leaving Richmond, Indiana, because
she is tired of sleeping with truck drivers. They meet and fall in love beside a tennis-ball
factory. Semina is kidnapped on the first night they spend together by one of her old
truck-driver friends. Peter Renoir pursues her the length and breadth of highway ioi. He finds
the semi-truck in which she was a prisoner. The truck is empty with the ex­ception of the corpse
of a midget named Russell.

He finally catches
up with them in the men's room of a truck stop in New Jersey. He realizes that he has lost her
because die truck driver is built better. Peter climbs to the top of a ten-story building and
dives off. Nine floors later he repents of his rash action but alas, too late. The movie ends and
we are left with a sense of having seen it.

HOW YOU, THE
READER, CAN APPRECIATE THIS STORY.

Begin like this.
You the reader, somewhat awkward at first, begin reading this story with as much intelligence and
sensibility as you can bring to it. In the passages where the theme (animal suffering) is most
acute, you will be at least able to note the technique and methodology by which parts of the
effect were achieved. But when the theme weakens, you will find yourself with a surplus of
attention which you can profitably direct toward some other activity.

Preferably some
quiet and fatal activity.