The Losers' Club

Martin Sierra, a would-be writer with a dead-end job, has accumulated a mountain of rejection slips, and is in love with a woman who is in love with another woman. He cruises the personal ads and the club scene in NYC's East Village, which is weird beyond belief -- transvestites, retro-punks, rockabilly boys with "elephant trunk haircuts," nuevo-hippies with "fruit-coloured granny glasses, top hats, and love beads."

He meets Amaris, who's into vampires, and Lola, a painter who takes him to a graveyard to introduce him to her parents. When she shows him her paintings of dismembered NYPD officers, she nudges him and says, "Is mah' clit showin' or what?"

There are some very funny lines in the book. Some typical examples:

"And that was Atomic Bitchwax from their 'Total Castration' CD," Starr would announce. "Catch them later this month at the Fierce Pussy Festival, along with The Post-Christ Disciples, Screaming Headless Torso, and Shirley McDicklips and the Ass Clamps." * * * * On the corner of 6th Street, ragamuffin skate punks congregated, soliciting funds, while up the block, a high-spirited gal with neon-green hair and yellow day-glo lipstick hawked issues of a revived journal entitled, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. "Fuck you, sir?" she cried to the impassive pedestrians. "M'am? Fuck you?"

The author, Richard Perez, cites Bukowski and Henry Miller as influences, and lists as favourite books Lolita by Nabokov, Nausea by Sartre, The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson.

Author Interview

Through Siberia by Accident

Dervla Murphy is a beer-swilling cigar-smoking travel writer with more than 20 books to her credit. She is also an eccentric Irish granny who prefers travelling by bike. She does not own a car, microwave, washing machine, computer, TV, or central heating.

The misfortunes she has suffered during her travels are many:

Afghanistan – broken ribs, scorpion bite
Albania – three attempted robberies
Cameroon – “triple tooth abscess”
Ethiopia – dislocated knee, robbed by bandits
India – heat stroke, mumps, brucellosis (brucellosis!)
Laos – torn tendon in right foot
Madagascar – gout, more broken ribs, Hep A
Nairobi-London flight – life threatening clot in leg
Pakistan - amoebic dysentery
Rumania – robbed by police, concussion, fractured coccyx, broken foot
South Africa – tick bite fever, shattered left arm
Zimbabwe - malaria

In 2002 she crossed the Russian Federation by the Baikal-Amur Mainline, her intention being to cycle through a portion of Siberia. In this she was prevented by a couple of injuries that occurred before her starting point was reached. Instead she continued to travel by train and boat in the Baikal and Sakha areas.

She extols the friendliness of Siberians, and falls under the spell of Lake Baikal and the Lena River. Her observations are intelligent, well-informed, and contain none of the usual whining often found in travel writing. She complains about toilet facilities only once. She is gutsy, pragmatic and open-minded.

My sole complaint is her continual fussing over pets. No incident is too trivial to report on:

As I drank, the pup farted – potent farts which at first provoked only laughter and comically expressed disgust. Then, as they increased in volume and frequency, filling the cabin with asphyxiating fumes, the consensus was that he should be exiled. Tears gathered in the little boy’s eyes. But I had finished my beer, and thawed, and was returning to the platform where the pup could sit on my lap because Baikal’s wind would disperse his wind. When I had found the most sheltered corner he gazed up at my face with a puzzled expression. No doubt I smelt wrong, foreign. Soon he struggled to be free, loudly relieved his bowels behind a milk churn and thereafter farted no more.

Murphy undertook this trip in 2002, when she was in her early 70s. A few years later she returned and completed it, the results being published as Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals.

The Real World

A voice hisses in your ear: "If you're not at the table in two nano-seconds, you're dead meat."

You jump up from the computer and dash out of the room.  You can feel the floor vibrating behind you from your father's heavy tread.

He is a big man with round shoulders and a round back. At the table he hunches over his plate, his head bobbing as he eats.

You mother says, "What were you doing, dear?"

"Just goofing around on the computer."

She shakes her head in disapproval. "You spend entirely too much time on that thing, Donald. You're going to lose touch with reality."

You roll your eyes. If anyone's unreal, it's your parents. Sometimes it's almost as though they occupy a different universe, one which intersects yours only at the supper table.

Take your dad, for instance. Sets off every day briefcase in hand, crisp and alert, and 10 hours later returns home looking like he's been mugged. Who knows for sure where he goes or what he's been up to?

Your mother on the other hand might as well belong to another species. The stuff she does! Cleaning the bathroom, doing the laundry. Bizarre!

"Donald."

Maybe  they're not even your parents. Maybe they're aliens.

"Donald?"

From another dimension. And those aren't their real faces, they're masks. Latex masks they peel off every night before climbing into bed and--

"Donald!" hollers your father.

"Yes, dad?"

"Fer crissake, kid, your mother's talking to you."

"Oh, sorry. What is it, mom?"

"There's something your father and I want to tell you."

A horrible thought enters your mind. "Oh no, you're not pregnant, are you?"

She smiles and shakes her head. "How would you like to take a few days off school?"

Your eyes bug out in disbelief. "Seriously?"

"We thought it might be good for you and your father to spend some time together."

"What?"

You mother reaches out to reassure you. Her touch is cool and slimy. "At the office," she says

Your father seizes another lungfish from a platter and bites its head off. "Time you see what the real world is like," he grunts.