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Willy Whale
Di Jaxy Mono
Azioni libro
Inizia a leggereLunghezza: 279 pagine4 ore
- Editore:
- Jaxy Mono
- Pubblicato:
- Jun 6, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781311231574
- Formato:
- Libro
Descrizione
How do you solve a mystery when you can’t trust your own sanity?
Hollywood private detective Willy Whale finds a severed human nose one morning in his burger. Convinced that he’s either hallucinating or that he is the victim of a cosmic practical joke, Willy initially tries to ignore his gruesome discovery. But when a string of unsolved murders all point back to this sinister first clue, Willy realizes that he has stumbled on a dark secret.
As all around him A-list stars lose their heads, starlets sell their bodies to become famous, and movie moguls shoot out the holes between their ears, Willy tracks the unknown killer through Hollywood, even as all the evidence seems to point to him being the murderer. Running from his past, his memories, and even his real name, Willy knows he must discover the true killer before the cops begin to look into his identity.
And time is running out.
Wildly funny, hardbitten, and moving, "Willy Whale" is a modern day Raymond Chandler detective novel, spiced with a dash of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", and accompanied by a chaser of "Doctor Faustus". It is a brilliant and startlingly original renewal of a stale and almost worn-out genre. You'll never guess the end of this mind-bending mystery!
Informazioni sul libro
Willy Whale
Di Jaxy Mono
Lunghezza: 279 pagine4 ore
Descrizione
How do you solve a mystery when you can’t trust your own sanity?
Hollywood private detective Willy Whale finds a severed human nose one morning in his burger. Convinced that he’s either hallucinating or that he is the victim of a cosmic practical joke, Willy initially tries to ignore his gruesome discovery. But when a string of unsolved murders all point back to this sinister first clue, Willy realizes that he has stumbled on a dark secret.
As all around him A-list stars lose their heads, starlets sell their bodies to become famous, and movie moguls shoot out the holes between their ears, Willy tracks the unknown killer through Hollywood, even as all the evidence seems to point to him being the murderer. Running from his past, his memories, and even his real name, Willy knows he must discover the true killer before the cops begin to look into his identity.
And time is running out.
Wildly funny, hardbitten, and moving, "Willy Whale" is a modern day Raymond Chandler detective novel, spiced with a dash of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", and accompanied by a chaser of "Doctor Faustus". It is a brilliant and startlingly original renewal of a stale and almost worn-out genre. You'll never guess the end of this mind-bending mystery!
- Editore:
- Jaxy Mono
- Pubblicato:
- Jun 6, 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781311231574
- Formato:
- Libro
Informazioni sull'autore
Jaxy Mono - the world famous “monkey with a typewriter” - is a highly intelligent tail-less Barbary Ape (Macaca sylvanus) from Europe’s only population of wild monkeys in Gibraltar.
Jaxy (pronounced JAK-see) creates his works by tapping, apparently at random, on the screen of a “borrowed” (i.e. filched) iPad. Jaxy also thieves cameras, and he is a keen film-maker. His six hour documentary study of his left foot has won major prizes at several international film festivals.
Outside his artistic endeavours, Jaxy likes beer, bananas and his babies; and he dislikes fleas, being paid in peanuts, and zoos. His hobbies include foraging, grooming, rooting through trash-cans, and playing tag with his offspring.
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, Jaxy doesn’t believe in evolution, as he simply can’t accept that he is descended from creatures as primitive as human beings; especially Creationists.
Jaxy Mono has asserted his inalienable moral right to be identified as the author of his works; and anybody who asserts otherwise will be nipped on the butt.
Hard.
SOME EARLY REACTIONS TO JAXY'S WORK:
“Shakespeare was a monkey with a typewriter too. Only he didn’t have a typewriter. And Jaxy has an iPad! Just imagine the possibilities!” – Steve Jobs (contacted via séance)
“A stunning triumph of A.I. (Animal Intelligence). This pioneering work of trans-special fiction will revolutionize our understanding of Old World monkeys. Jaxy puts the genus back in genius!” – Sir David Attenborough
“Not bad for a baboon. But just imagine what a chimpanzee could do!” – Jane Goodall
“Yo, Jaxy, U got sum freaky beasts livin in yur bone-box. Yur won sikk monkey-man! XXX!” – Lindsay Lohan (via Twitter)
“You fucking ape! Call yourself a writer? You’re no more an author than a deaf fucker with a piano is Beethoven. When I’m done with you, you’re bush-meat. Give me back my wallet!” – Head Critic, Times Literary Supplement
“This is more than a HIT; it’s solid gold ape-$HIT! – We’re talking a telephone number advance here. With an area code up front. - Hey, are you listening? You don’t put the phone down on me, I put the phone down on you! – Hello? Hello?!?” – Buck Franklin, Jaxy’s agent
“Please buy my books; I need your bananas.” – Jaxy
Correlati a Willy Whale
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Anteprima del libro
Willy Whale - Jaxy Mono
Thursday
1
I walked in the Down & Up on Sunset and Vine. It was 9.32 a.m., that year Mickey Mouse ran for President on a traditional values ticket and Uncle Sam finally ‘fessed up he was queer and got hitched to Superman (Lois Lane was only a beard). I ordered my usual coffee, fries, and corpse burger topped with maggot cheese. The server (Opal
, bobbed brown hair, brown eyes, brown lipstick smile) poured a steaming slop of dirty brown water from a carafe into a white polystyrene cup and spat a gob of machine milk on top.
As Opal slid me the coffee, I caught sight of my image in a mirror behind the burger bar’s counter. Out of habit I sized it up. My reflection looked like it was a Caucasian male, about 38 years old, around 6 foot 1 inches tall, and as if it weighed approximately 190 pounds. It had a square jaw, square shoulders, and a cold, cruel look in its blue eyes which I didn’t like and didn’t think was in mine. As for clothes, today it was modeling a cheap shirt and tie, a rumpled dead man’s suit, and thrift shop shoes. Just like every other day.
My reflection never looked good in the mornings that year, but that morning it looked real bad. It hadn’t shaved; its greasy drab hair needed a wash, a cut, and a comb; and its complexion looked like my liver – greenish, spotted, and bloated with half-metabolized vodka and psychotropic pharmaceuticals.
Then I noticed the first strange thing. My mirror image had a jagged cut over its right eye that I didn’t know how it had got. I instinctively reached up to pick off the scab, just to see if it hurt. But my forehead was puzzlingly smooth; I felt nothing. I tried to recall where my reflection had gone and what it had done last night whilst I’d been blacked-out drunk. But there was only a hollowed-out blank space where my reflection’s memories should have been, because it was only an optical illusion, and not a human being. So I wrote the jagged cut off as one of those things you can’t explain. Like why the sun rises. Or why a child dies.
That was how it began – His Coming to Hollywood. I didn’t tie my shoelaces left over right. Or spill salt. Or recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Or break a looking glass. Or do anything out of the ordinary at all. It was just a day. God was dead and humanity was dying, but the sun was shining down on Los Angeles, so it didn’t seem to matter. But then the sun always shines down on L.A. That’s why the movie moguls built the Big Pretend here between the desert and the sea. And, of course, eternities and infinities don’t ever really begin or end: it’s just that occasionally we realize that they’re all around us, and that we’re a part of them and they’re a part of us. And, as the astrophysicists theorize, it’s at infinities and eternities that absurdities become normal and normality becomes absurd. And Nothingness comes into Being.
But I’m getting way out ahead of myself. We haven’t been properly introduced yet.
Hi there! The name’s Whale. With an h
, as in cetacean. Willy Whale. A Mex gang-banger with a teardrop tattoo under one eye first called me that. We were juiced on mescal and yage in a bar in the Arizona desert. The greaser stroked his mustache, and Spanglished that I was like the erect penis of a gray whale he’d once seen washed up on a Baja beach; six feet long and as white as lard. Willy Whale. Then the cholo laughed. His teeth were gold and rotten, and his breath reeked like vulture vomit. I broke my fist on his jaw. He broke the mescal bottle on my skull. The earth fell on my nose.
I was thirty-three then - old enough to be crucified. But I wasn’t a volunteer, not even for a crown of razor blades. I was a man alone, without a job or a home or a family. I was driving across America to the ocean that the Indians say has no memory, in order to forget who I was and what I’d done and even my own name.
Willy Whale
. W.W.
Double-You Double-You.
When I came round it seemed like a good alias for an ex-cop on the run with nothing in the world but a tattered copy of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and a vague idea to turn private dick. So I let the name stick.
Only, don’t go thinking I’m anything like Chandler’s ace private investigator Philip Marlowe – a knight of sorts, tarnished to be sure, but still a knight-errant.
I’m not some shop-soiled modern-day Galahad who goes around slaying dragons, rescuing damsels in distress, and putting right the wrongs of this world. I’m just trying to scratch out a living. Just like you. And if the world’s not what it should be, or could be, don’t blame me. Blame the Big Guy in the sky.
Anyhow, I swear this affidavit is a true and accurate account of my last case. Maybe you’ll object that it’s too weird to be true. But if you do, you’ll be dead wrong. It’s too weird to be a lie. Because this is Hollywood, where reality out-parodies (and out-paranoids) the most outrageous fantasies, and anything can happen, anything at all. You can’t even trust the ground beneath your feet on this beat. So don’t assume that as I write I
, that must mean I survive to tell my tale. Because maybe I die in this flick’s final reel.
Now, back to my story. First positions! Roll camera! Take two!
I walked into the Down & Up on Sunset and Vine. It was 9.32 a.m., that year emotions were sold in bottles like hormones and the Surgeon-General officially declared love to be a sexually transmitted disease. My blood was about thirty degrees proof, my stomach was moaning and rumbling like a lovesick beluga, and I had a headache to go. At the restaurant’s counter I ordered a coffee, fries, and my usual Double Trouble corpse burger. The server (Opal
, would-be actress, Alabama) poured me the coffee and drawled that she’d bring on over my burger and fries ‘coz the cook was kinda slow.
I laid Opal my last Ulysses S. Grant like I had a whole wad of currency, and not just a handful of maxed-out credit cards and a few cobwebs in my billfold. She changed me an Andrew Jackson, two Alexander Hamiltons, a Tom Jefferson, and a torn and scotch-taped George Washington. I thought, dead American presidents are cheap. Money buys them. Money sells them. Just like the live ones back East.
I took the coffee and sat down at a window table. A short, fat, bald taxi-driver, his tired all-night face cratered with acne, took out a take out of chicken carrion and milk shakes to his cab. A gray-skinned white-haired black guy dressed in blue overalls sat alone in a booth, reading the newspaper. His teeth were yellow, and he spat on his food before he ate it. Like a fly. He was mumbling to himself, too; because that’s what crazy people do. They talk a lot too much. Or not at all.
I sipped my coffee. It tasted sour, like the aftertaste of vomit, and it was laced with enough caffeine to wake the dead. The word on the streets was that the Down & Up (corporate slogan What Goes Down Must Come Up!
) recycled the bio-matter its clients deposited in its restrooms as nutritive supplement
, even the puke. An opportunistic lawyer started up a class action suit, alleging cruel and unusual nutrition
and involuntary coprovoria
. However, court-ordered DNA analysis showed the Down & Up’s specials
contained coyote, kangaroo, and cat remains, but not retrieved human excrement, and the judge threw out the case.
I ate in the Down & Up most mornings I could afford to eat. It was cheap, and I liked the burger bar’s gray ache of despair, its recovered meat products, and the endless soap opera of its ever-changing cast of unfunny funnymen, wannabe never-will-be actresses, and unwanted broken toy-boys. Because happiness is delusion followed by disillusion. And the Down & Up had no illusions left to lose. And no lines, neither.
I yawned and looked round the restaurant. The fly-guy shuffled out, leaving behind his newspaper. Opal was chatting about getting a boob job with the meat-on-the-bone hunk (Hank
, male model, Texas) who was mopping the floor. Hank had about as much personality as a Styrofoam cup, but that hadn’t stopped Arnie Schwarzenegger making it big, so Hank was convinced he could become an A-list movie star, and even California governor.
In the burger bar’s kitchen, a college dropout with zits and a pussy tickler beard (Aaron
, stand-up comic, New Jersey) practiced his patter and splattered roaches with his spatula as he fried up my corpse burger. He was picking his nose. He played it like it a scratch, but I saw his finger root around inside his nostril and then flick snot on my burger. But I didn’t care. Carcass was carcass.
The clock ticked round to 9.38 a.m. My head stopped pounding like a jackhammer and I started to feel halfway human. Outside, on the Down & Up’s forecourt, Diogenes, the local neighborhood tramp, dug through an overturned trashcan, scaring up a seagull. Across the steel flash and chrome blur of Sunset Boulevard, a gust of hot wind caught a pair of giant inflatable breasts moored to the roof of a plastic surgery clinic and bumped their pink nipples together. I stared at the airborne mammaries. The floating zeppelin breasts stared back at me. Their nipples didn’t even blink.
I tried hard not to think. Not to think at all. It was just a day. The day after the day before. The day before the day after. Mimi’s birthday. I couldn’t decide if she was none again or five years old.
Because do you grow up and old when you’re dead?
So who’s Me-Me?
Opal drawled.
I realized I must have murmured my daughter’s name under my breath.
Opal slid a plastic tray with my Double Trouble burger and fries and the fly-guy’s forgotten newspaper onto my table. Her bib was gone, the top three buttons of her blouse had come undone, and she’d repainted her brown lipstick smile. She looked at me like she’d seen me somewhere, like in a magazine or on TV. But I wasn’t fazed. Because I’m often taken for this or that screen actor. It’s because of my eyes – as blue and empty as the L.A. sky.
You OK, Mister?
Opal asked me. You were, like, muttering to yourself.
I thought, because that’s what crazy people do. I said, I was in character, running my lines.
O-oh, I knew I knew your face,
she came on hot. You’re that doctor, or that lawyer, in that show, or that film, aren’t you? I just lo-o-ove your eyes. I’m your biggest. I’m an ac-tor, too.
She said it like that. Like ac-tor
rhymed with poor
and whore
. I smelt the stale vodka and sour coffee on my breath, and glanced down at my dead man’s suit and thrift shop shoes. I looked as sexy as last night’s leftovers. But I guessed the wannabe figured I was in costume as well as character, and I’d gone undercover to deep research a role.
So are you a member of SAG?
I asked her.
Do I look fat?
Opal pouted sulkily.
SAG, the Screen Actors’ Guild, the union,
I explained.
No. Should I be?
Opal asked naively. I made her fresh meat, just shipped in by Greyhound bus. Could you help me?
she went on. I’ve got so much to learn. We could meet tonight, after my shift, and talk about my training.
Voice or body?
Both, if you like. You could teach me your method. I’ve always wanted to be famous. Maybe you could get me a part on your show?
The hook was barbed and baited and dangled in front of my eyes. I reacted like a stuffed fish in a glass display case. You must be mixing me up with some other guy,
I mumbled. I’m really a P.D.
Uh?
Opal grunted in confusion. She wasn’t the sharpest knife in the knife-block.
I’m a private dick,
I explained, flashing my tin badge.
Oh, I see. You’re one of those nasty detective creeps,
Opal grimaced, her mouth hardening into a brittle shell. She tossed her bobbed brown hair and muttered dismissively, Well, enjoy your meal.
Suddenly I was no Joe she needed to know. Even her eyes seemed less brown. Hank looked up from his mop as she sashayed back to the counter, and she muttered to the hunk that I was just some nobody
. Because you ain’t even anybody in L.A. unless you’re somebody in the picture trade.
I chewed on a cardboard fry and stared vacantly out of the Down & Up’s window. Another gust of hot wind bounced the giant inflatable breasts up and down on their cables and blew an empty plastic bag across Vine, like a ball of tumbleweed. Wetbacks hung on the sidewalk, hoping to be picked up by passing trucks as cheap day labor. The Latinos had braved the Rio Grande, recently restocked with ‘gators and piranhas by the Border Patrol, to wait there. America wasn’t exactly their Promised Land. But I guessed they didn’t have much back home in Mexico and Guatemala, either. Except families to feed.
I yawned again, unfolded the fly-guy’s used L.A. Times, and wided my eyes in surprise. Because, across the newspaper’s front page, in a typeface usually reserved for J.C.’s Second Coming or nuclear Armageddon, a banner headline proclaimed:
BY DEAD!
My mouth came undone in shock. Because By
– Byron Duke – was one of only a handful of Hollywood stars (Tom, Jen, Matt, Brad, Angelina) recognizable by their given names. Beneath the headline was a picture. For a moment it was just dots, but then my eyes focused, the dots blurred together, and By’s familiar features swam into focus. He had black hair, gray eyes, and a smile that made you believe he was your best friend, even though he was a complete stranger. Now he was dead he looked more like Clark Gable – the King of Hollywood
– than ever.
As I sipped my coffee, I read how the forty-five year old A-lister’s body had been found floating in the swimming pool of his hundred million dollar mansion in the Hollywood hills. A Lieutenant Guppy of the L.A.P.D. was quoted as saying no nose had been found
. For a few seconds I wondered if some souvenir hunter had broken it off, like By was an ancient Greek statue. Or if By had sliced it off himself in a drug-fuelled rage. Like Vincent Van Gogh had cut off his own ear whilst he was wasted on absinthe.
But then I realized that nose
was obviously a misprint for note
, and that meant the cops suspected suicide. I tried to imagine why a healthy, rich, handsome Hollywood leading man would drown himself in his own infinity pool, but I couldn’t come up with any good reasons. So I wondered if somebody hadn’t held his head underwater whilst he struggled for breath. And if his death wasn’t murder, and not felo-de-se.
Lower down the paper’s front page there was an obituary listing By’s ex-wives (five, no children), and his movies (thirty-three, some so bad that they could have been prosecuted as crimes against humanity, but all moneymakers). The journo eulogized that not only had women found Byron Duke sexy, but men had thought him manly – apparently a priceless combo
in the entertainment industry.
I chewed on another cardboard fry and pushed the paper aside. Because Hollywood’s biggest and most bankable star had never given my existence a moment’s thought, so I didn’t see why I should care that he’d gone for a long swim face down in his pool. A few more seconds ticked by. A cop cruiser raced down Vine, its blue lights flashing, and a bag lady pushed a shopping trolley laden down with her worldly goods along the sidewalk. The Big Rock went on blindly racing round the sun. It was just one of those dead moments between life’s fade-in and death’s fade-out that get cut from our biopics.
I raised the corpse burger to my mouth. I bit through the sesame seed bun, and felt ketchup spurt tangily inside my mouth. But then the second strange thing that morning happened – my teeth caught on something cold and tasteless and rubbery, like a wad of gristle.
It tasted gross and vile, and I gagged and almost vomited in disgust. I took the burger out of my mouth and put it down on the plastic tray. As curious as a cat with a death wish, I lifted up the top half of the bun and peeled back a slice of tomato. Instead of a meat patty, there, on a damp lettuce leaf, garnished with a slice of pickled gherkin and smeared with scarlet ketchup, lay a gray and fleshy (and quite uncooked) human nose.
2
I blinked in disbelief. But when I opened my eyes again the nose was still there, sprawling on its leafy bed like a naked starlet draping her limbs across a green chaise longue. I poked it nervously with a French fry. It was a real human nose sure enough, and not a plastic toy, or the DTs, or some weird drug flashback. Clumps of black bristles sprouted from its nostrils like pubic hair, and my front teeth had left an impression in its tip. I thought for a moment that I was going crazy. But I knew there was nothing wrong with my head. It was the world that was all wrong.
I glanced round anxiously, suspecting that some joker was playing a trick on me. I half-expected a grinning TV host to walk in the restaurant, microphone in hand, and to announce that I was the victim of a hidden camera prank; or for cook Aaron to snigger and leer cross-eyed at me from the kitchen, meat-cleaver in hand. But nobody was laughing at me. Nobody was even looking. Aaron was chopping tomatoes in the kitchen, Opal was primping her hair in the mirror, and Hank was mopping out the women’s restroom. Otherwise the Down & Up was as empty as a hole in the sky.
I looked down. The nose was still lying on the sesame seed bun. I felt like I was trapped inside a bad B-movie, but the director wouldn’t yell Cut!
Sweat trickled from my armpits and damped my shirt and my hands shook. I instinctively touched my face, but my own nose was still there, so at least the severed organ wasn’t mine. I covered the burger nose with a paper napkin, as though I was pulling a sheet over the face of a corpse.
Then, trembling with anxiety, I tried to make the nose’s appearance in my morning burger make sense. I wondered if the Down & Up corporation wasn’t economizing by mixing wetback Mex meat in its burgers. Or if snot-flicking Aaron wasn’t really a crazed serial killer who disposed of his victims piece by piece in the restaurant’s specials
. Or if the nose wasn’t just a meat-packer’s proboscis sliced off in a gruesome industrial accident. For a moment I fantasized of starting up a lawsuit alleging involuntary cannibalism
and carno-psycho-phobic trauma
, and suing the Down & Up for millions. But I knew I couldn’t call the cops and report my discovery, because they’d only start asking questions I couldn’t answer. Like what was my real name.
I peeked under the paper napkin, hoping against hope that the nose had vanished back into the never and nowhere. But it hadn’t gone anywhere. I knew I had to get rid of it. Because a nose isn’t like nail clippings or hair shavings or exfoliated skin or excrement. It’s not harmless human waste product. It’s prima facie evidence of murder.
I thought about abandoning the severed proboscis, walking out of the Down & Up, and never coming back. But I’d told Opal I was a private dick, and I knew I could be traced. Then I contemplated dumping the nose in the trash, but the can was already crammed full to overflowing. As for disposing of it down the waste chute of my throat, I’d mislaid my appetite some place.
So I tipped the nose out of the burger onto the newspaper. Then I folded the L.A. Times over, carried it to the men’s restroom, and bolted shut the door. I tipped the nose out of the paper into the toilet bowl. Since my bladder was bursting, I hosed viscous yellow hot-weather urine – Down & Up lemonade – over it, and pulled the toilet’s handle. Water swirled and vortexed through the bowl. However, when I looked down in the toilet bowl, the nose was still there, bobbing up and down like a champagne cork. I flushed the toilet again, but only a thin trickle of water leaked into the bowl.
Before the toilet’s cistern could fill up again, a heavy fist banged on the door. Hey, I gotta clean. What you doing in there so long? Digging for gold?
hunk Hank demanded aggressively.
I looked down at the nose bobbing up and down in the water buoyantly, and yelled back, Gimme a minute, can’t you?
However, Hank banged on the door again, and the bolt rattled and slid back with the blow. So, in panic, I scooped the nose out of the bowl and stuffed it back in the L.A. Times. Then I unbolted the door and walked out with the damp newspaper folded under my arm. Hank peered in the cubicle suspiciously and
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