The Culture Bunker – Fiction

The Culture Bunker

by William Ham
illustration by Rob Zammarchi

Mojo P. (not his real pseudonym) had a problem.

You see, it was 36 hours before deadline, a mere day and a half before the gutter presses ran with the freelance blood of the terminally pedantic, and still he hadn’t the slightest idea what his next column was going to be about. Mojo P. had a writer’s block, which he had already used to break the glass encasing his emergency column (cribbed wholesale from an old issue of Architectural Digest but with all the adjectives removed and replaced with the word “rad” to avoid lawsuits) some months past, so that was no use to him now. In his search for relevant source material, Mojo P. had scoured every daily newspaper on the eastern seaboard, the entire reference section of the Nowheresville Public Library, and the restroom walls at the Museum of Modern History, and all he had come away with was a limerick which began “There once was a mon from Caesaria…” and some kind of weird flaky patch on his inner thigh. Mojo P. was in what better men with nicer haircuts would call a quandary.

Mojo P.’s phone rang. It often did when someone was calling him. With an icy sense of dread, he answered, using one of his many witty salutations. “Hello?”

“Mojo P.? It’s Scott H. at L. Look, sorry to trouble ya, buddy, but we’re going to press in thirty-six hours and we need your latest misuse of valuable magazine space as soon as we can get it. You got it for us?”

“Uh, sure, Scott H.,” Mojo P. replied. “I’m just working out the kinks in it, y’know, ironing out the ironies and so forth. It’s, well, kinda been a rough month for me, what with my pet lemur having Dhengi fever and all. My concentration isn’t what it should be, and…”

“Yeah, I hear you, Mojo P., but this is a magazine, not a home for wayward didactics. Tell ya what. You fax me the piece pronto or we send Fonzo G. from Subscriptions and Extortion over to break all your bones in reverse alphabetical order. Ulna, tibia…”

“Okay, Scott H., okay,” Mojo P. said. “I’ll make some arbitrary changes and bang it off to you right away.”

“I knew I could count on you, Mojo P. Be threatening you soon. Bye!”

Mojo P. hung up and commenced to pace around his palatial broom closet of a home, gesturing wildly, talking to himself. Unfortunately, he wasn’t paying any attention to what he was saying. He was far more concerned with finding some subject, any subject, to fulfill his minimum monthly requirement of contrived whimsy and drug jokes. But how?

He picked up one of his many notebooks, filled to the college-ruled brim with unfinished short stories, aborted essays, and shopping lists in iambic pentameter. The germs of many a squandered idea had gone there to die, yet Mojo P. hoped against hope that he could attach the electrodes to them and bring them to shambling, sputtering life. He scanned the hastily-scribbled titles and arthritic grabbers within. “The Rhyme of the Ancient Marinara,” or “Ode to a Jar of Sauce That’s Been In My Refrigerator Since the Reagan Administration.” “It was the best of times – ah, no it fucking wasn’t.” “Brother, Can You Paradigm?” Inspiration struck. Mojo P. grabbed the nearest Bic (subtle product placement) and scrawled a note to himself on the notebook cover – “Mojo P. – Burn this immediately. Mojo P.” All well and good, but the column was no nearer completion. And the clock was ticking. Strange – it’s digital.

Wearily, Mojo P. flopped onto his La-Z-Scribe imitation naugahyde chair, head (probably his) in hand. What was it that his eighth-grade slander teacher, Mr. X., had told him? “Everything is research?” Hmmm, that’s as good an excuse as any. He idly fingered his remote and sat back, ready to spelunk for inspiration in the cathode caves. (To our metaphor-impaired readers: That means he turned on his TV.)

Click. “…can cut through a six-month old infant and still slice this tomato like a surgeon! Of course, we don’t recommend that you actually…”

Click. “…return to part ninety-six of Ken Burns’ Lacrosse in a few minutes, but first, I’m going to stare back at you, licking my lips noisily, until you send us all your…”

Click. “…you mean to tell me that you were married to Fido for six years and had three children with him before you realized he was a…”

Click. “…no, Gumby, no! Get away from that blowtorch before you…”

Clunk. Big help that was. Mojo P. was more blocked than before. He jacknifed out of his chair and resumed his impatient vigil in front of the armed fortress of his imagination. Mojo P. paused before his bookshelf and pulled out a volume at random. This trick’s worked before, he thought. Just pick two or three words out of a book, juxtapose them, and write a thousand brilliant words on the resulting collision. Mojo P. opened to a page, closed his eyes, and pointed to a fate-ordained word. “Glue.” Okay. He repeated the process on another page. “Plunge.” And once more… “Brotherhood.” Mojo P. wrote the three words on a legal pad and spent the next two hours cognating desperately. Let’s see… what about a story on a secret society of disgraced Freemasons and former Klansmen who get together on weekends and leap from great heights into vats of epoxy as a kind of pasty Anabaptism? Ah, shit, that’s no good, there was a TV movie last month on the same subject. What was he going to do? Reluctantly, Mojo P. decided that it was time to seek a different kind of guidance.

He picked up the phone again and speed-dialed his personal astrologer and psychic acquiantance, Aries K. It was she who was instrumental in most of Mojo P.’s biggest decisions, including giving up meat by-products and sacrificing his toaster oven to Gekesh, the lizard god, in order to stabilize his rent. Surely she’d be of help.

“Ah, Mojo P.,” Aries K. said, “I knew it was you.”

“Wow,” said Mojo P. “Did you pick up my vibrations or something?”

“Oh, no, I just bought one of those incoming call identifiers. What can the cosmos do for you today?”

“Well, Aries K., I’ve been having trouble coming up with a subject for my latest column.”

“Literary impotence, of course. A common complaint. Let me punch up your star chart on Andromeda OnLine and get into a trance-like state… ahh… okay. It says here that your moon is in escrow and that Saturn has just left the seventh house without collecting his security deposit… yes, the stars tell me you should write a piece on the sensuous qualities of peat moss.”

Mojo P. paused skeptically (one of his finest talents). “Are you sure?”

“Hey, the universe is never wrong 75% of the time. Is there anything else I could help you with? You need an herbal diuretic? I have them on special this week. What about this week’s Power Ball numbers?”

“Um, no thanks, Aries K. I think I’m all set for now.”

“Lovely. I’d stay and chat but I have a demonic possession scheduled for three o’clock. It’s pretty cool – they can do them by e-mail now. Wash your aura! Ciao!”

Mojo P. hung up. Apparently, even the stars were aligned against him. There were already two different pieces on sex and sphagnum scheduled for this month; no way would Scott H. accept another one. The painful truth seemed obvious – Mojo P. was finished as an unpaid hyperbolist. He filled a snifter with cherry brandy, grenadine, buttermilk and Formula 409, plopped back in his chair and proceeded to guzzle himself into an epistolary stupor. If he couldn’t be a writer, at least he could drink like one.

Somewhere in the tenth hour of his coma, Mojo P. was rousted by the voice of his conscience (portrayed most convincingly by James Earl Jones). “There’s no need to fret, Mojo P. The answer to your impasse is simple. You need to write a column about your inability to write a column. You can put it in third-person and rip off the format from that chick who does that self-indulgent weekly feature in the Phoenix. And since it is a music magazine you write for, just throw in a rock reference or two and you’ll be aces. They’ll call it clever, post-modern, snakily self-referential. The rabble’ll eat it up. Think about it. I’ll be in the libido if you need me.”

Mojo P. sat up in his chair, his head throbbing like the bass on a Jesus Lizard album. He stood up, wiped the toxic drool from his chin, stumbled to his stereo, put on his newly purchased Lydia Lunch at the Met CD to clear his head, then sat back down, considering his brain’s sage and deeply mellifluous advice. He thought for a moment, then shook his aching head, sighing.

“Nahh,” Mojo P. said, “They’d never buy it.”