The Prisoner of Vandam Street Read Free Page A

of banana trees, a sacred hornbill bird, and a group of little brown children playing beside a coffee-colored river.

Chapter Three
    B y all rights and all wrongs, I should’ve died that night, and there’ve been times, gentile reader, when I wish I had. Does it make that much difference to the world when another bright little spark goes out in the eye of a stray on the busy corner of truth and vermouth? I’m wearing the shirt my father died in and his arm is coming out of my sleeve. Is there anyone awake tonight in this little town or was it already dead before the virus hit? In that calm, reflective rage that inevitably comes to us all, I think we can agree that our lives are works of fiction, and that it hardly matters in what manner you lived or died or shat through a typewriter. Just assume, gentile reader, that we are walking in single file through the united nations of hell and you are walking slightly ahead of the character but slightly behind the author and then the author conks on page fifty-seven leaving only you and the character to fight it out over a few scraps of imagination. “But what happened to the mystery?” some discerning reader may no doubt remark. “What happened to the mystery of life?” We’ll get to that in a moment. Right now we have a dead author on our hands, and like all dead authors he gets better with time. And like all living authors, he knew that all he really wanted was fame and immortality, and like all dead authors he knows that it’s a trade-off and that the less you usually get of the former the more you often receive of the latter, if you follow meeeeeee, which you probably don’t. Not that I’m Jesus or anybody; I’m just another dead author looking for the right place to use a semicolon and aspiring to inspire before I expire which happily is never too late for a dead author. But now the editor who has just returned from a busy night of air-kissing Michael Jackson’s publicist at a cocktail party is scanning this shit and thinks he detects a slight change in the tonality which could either be a literary cry for help or a trendy new writing style that the casual critic might mistake for serious writing. It’s kind of a refreshing change from the formulaic mystery format, and what the hell, it’s only mildly insulting to the reader who might conceivably realize that he may have a dead author on his hands and sure as shit doesn’t want to see the fictional character killed off as well, so the editor e-mails the publisher, and while the dead author and his fucking typewriter are drifting off to hell through the torporous Texas night, he brings in a cold nephew from a blue prison or a well-intentioned highly alliterative asshole to complete the work after the fashion that a respectable cult of readers around the world has come to know and love. Like all good editors, the editor resents the author, and the publisher doesn’t care about the editor or the author, both of whom resent the publisher, and the author, like all good authors, writes with a total disregard for the reader, who, like all good lovers, loves the heart who doesn’t love him, and everybody hates Hollywood. The publisher thinks he owns all this shit, but he doesn’t. It’s a borrowed campfire.
    Most Americans should’ve probably skipped this chapter, anyway, but fortunately we’re too busy driving vehicles, taking dumps, whacking off all at the same time, and we’re afraid we missed something in the back-story. Or we might be sharper than that, and we might jump through our asshole and shout, “What asshole published this shit? What asshole edited this shit? What asshole wrote this shit?” And the dead author would probably say, “Me and my fucking typewriter are saving you a seat in hell because you’re the asshole who’s reading this shit.” And, you know, they’d all be right. That’s the way it is, innit?

Chapter Four
    I n life, I’ve always thought, it’s a good thing to practice