Help this writer go from homeless shelter to best seller

Hey! I'm writing a book. Think if David Lynch and Noam Chomsky had a baby, and that baby was put in charge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's insanely ambitious, and I've never been published. This bad boy is gonna cover themes of addiction, homelessness, social movements, 9/11, Texas history, the CIA, and comic books. Somehow all these threads have come together in a thorough outline I've already written out, and it'd be pretty cool to have your help transforming it into a full blown novel. I'm only about 1% of the way through but this sucker is getting finished one way or another, so a little bread could really help with the turnaround by financing my research, subsidizing my time, and eventually covering the early costs of publishing. There are much better causes to give your money to, but hey, I live in a homeless shelter so you don't have to feel too guilty about throwing a few coins my way! What the hell.

Below is the opening section of my book. I'll keep y'all posted with updates along the way. Cheers!

Untitled:

Mr. Teagarden bounces in his moccasins as Cleto Nagasaki shows the class a display case. Inside are Phil Collins’ most treasured artifacts. Bennie instantly clocks Davy Crockett’s laser-beam long rifle, William Barret Travis’ massive katana with which he drew the proverbial “line in the sand,” and of course the crown jewel of all Alamo sacramentals, Jim Bowie’s famous Wolverine claws. 

Cleto cut an impressive figure for a tour guide, seven feet of muscle, pressed jeans, pearl-snap shirt emulating the state flag of Texas, and topped off with a Stetson covering his pale eyebrows. He was the one who caught Bennie as he nearly collapsed. Teagarden was too enraptured in frothy ecstasy over the idols of dubious provenance to have any awareness of how his students were behaving. This was most of the public’s first opportunity to see the Collins Collection. He gawked and cooed and wiped flecks of spittle from the corners of his mustache with a handkerchief as the commotion erupted behind him. He did a right heel spin and saw through his foggy glasses the class totally absorbed in Bennie being set upright by the Herculean Nagasaki. 

“Good, Lash. I had hoped to see more of this from your peers. I didn’t think you were paying attention,” he said.

The seventh graders vibrated with a mix of annoyance, boredom, and savage mockery.

“He’s probably just turning on his Phoenix powers. Pussy,” Spider Mumtaz blurted. Hyena cackles ricocheted throughout the shrine.

“That’ll be detention, Mr. Mumtaz. Utter one more syllable and you’re back on the bus!” Spider motioned zipped lips and thrown key, holding up a peace sign. When Teagarden turned away, he lowered his index finger and gestured at Bennie.

“I’m fine, by the way,” Bennie said as he approached the glass for a closer look. He had spent the year paying only passive attention in his Texas history classes, vaguely absorbing the lore of the heroic struggle for freedom, justice, and the American way. Mr. Teagarden zealously followed the curriculum, which told of rough and ready figures of superhuman grit and ambition, who reluctantly and with great anguish made fortunes off the slave-trade. They would shoot and cry, murder and mourn their way through piles of Mexican and Indian bodies on the road to civilization, where all survivors live in harmony. 

The cruelty of Santa Anna and the violence of the natives was elevated while that of the white colonists was excused. This was actually a slight improvement over the fairy tale told only a decade or so before, in which the transgressions of the colonizers were hardly mentioned at all. This was the legend generations of Texans grew up with, literally put in comic book form as Heroes of the Alamo and adopted into the state school curriculum in the 1950s. It reduced the conflict to a battle between good and evil, brainwashing millions of students whose history instruction would be periodically interrupted with atomic bomb drills where they ducked for cover under their desks. Bennie couldn’t identify with much in his life, but he could identify with comic books.

In the untameable constellations of his mind, Bennie adeptly maneuvered between realities, weaving webs of bewildering narrative. Kids often live in a world of imagination, but Bennie had a monastic drive to understand the real world of steel, brick, and bone through the lens of his fantasies. Reality has no anchor without a grand arc which to attach itself. Most people just float, buoyed on incoherent waves of static, sustained by bread and circuses. The void swallowed his insides since before recorded memory, and he’s spent his entire short existence grappling his way out.

The spiritual riddle of his life began to unravel one night watching television. He wore Spongebob sleep shorts over Batman briefs, a plain white tee. His baby sister was asleep in his lap where she came to comfort him after some tears over an incident he can’t remember anymore. That’s when the X-Men cartoon from a decade before came on, flooding the room and his spirit with light. He felt his heart and brain take a shape and form where there had been none an instant ago. It enclosed him and his sister in a wall of protection, and here he would build them a home. 

“What happened to you? Did you die?” Rachel Mañana asked with gum smacking in her mouth, her face signaling genuine concern, apparently the only one. 

“I’m fine. Think I just had my legs locked.”

“Lol, you don’t even know how to stand right. Aw well, glad you didn’t croak on us,” she said, blowing a bubble nearly the size of her cabbage-patch doll head. It popped with a fragrant boom, narrowly avoiding a tangle with her mop of brown curls.

Cleto Nagasaki was glad he didn’t have to fill out a report of yet another kid collapsing and suffering a head injury on one of his tours. Still, these might still be woods he’s in. Kid might be an epileptic, or a narcoleptic, or on narcotics. 

“Almost took a tumble there, bud. You need to take a break? Maybe have a seat, can I call you an ambulance?” He asked squeamishly. 

“No, I’m fine. I just locked my legs.” 

“Okay good. Stay loose bud,” Nagasaki said, removing his Stetson to rub his scalp, revealing a shaved head holding up a face that looked like an eel’s. 

Bennie actually hadn’t slept much the previous night, or the night before that. Dreams of people with black clouds for faces or dozens of headless kittens crawling around his bed with their ghostly mewing made for insomnia. Exhaustion combined with intense stimuli to make his knees buckle. To be in the presence of such overwhelming lore shifted the tectonic plates under his feet. The splendor of the encounter with real-life myth sparked a full integration of his internal world with the history he learned in class. It rolled on him like divine revelation. He was touched.

“Alright, y’all get in your last looks. We’re about to head over to the Long Barracks. Don’t worry, lot’s of killing happened there,” Nagasaki announced to a chorus of cheers.

“But of course we stand on an ocean of blood in this shrine,” Mr. Teagarden interjected.

“Actually, that’s wrong,” retorted Cleto Nagasaki. 

The “ooooh” that followed nearly shook the walls down to their foundation. They filed out a heavy wooden side door and hung a left. It was a crispy blue morning soaked in sunshine.

Under the spiraling octopus arms of an ancient oak tree, they stood striped in shadow and light. As Cleto turned the students’ attention toward the old bricked prism of Spanish archways, Bennie cast his gaze toward an invisible distance. A chill rattled through his body as the ground beneath his shoes softened into pale blue-grey soil. The thunder of canon and roar of men was deafening, as great clouds of purple smoke filled the air and choked his throat. Brilliant flashes of violet-red and neon-yellow peppered his vision with spinning polka-dots. The Earth trembled and quaked under a black, starless sky. 

Men covered in scales of teal and burnt orange armor with high collars rushed past him aiming green rifles, shaped like tactical tubas. They blasted hot beams of energy that screamed through the haze toward a flood of angry Mexicans. The army pouring over the walls wore bulky blue and red costumes that exaggerated every muscle and helmets that curved over the brow and down the bridge of the nose, a duster of feathers trailing from the spike on top. They wore enormous codpieces, or so it appeared.

They fired rounds of lightning that exploded the defenders into a mist of marrow and gore. Bennie heard the muffled cries of women and children to his left through the walls of the church. The smell of burning hair and fried meat stung his nostrils and made him retch as he noticed the bulk of fighting whirling toward the long barracks. He felt no fear as he stood in idle hypnosis. 

His chest pounded as waves of intense pleasure squeezed through his veins. This was something he could relate to; blood, shit, men gurgling out their last breaths, a fluorescent carnage rippling through the early morning dark. Then he heard a singular voice raise above all the others.

“Aye ye nasty fuckas! Choke on me spotted dick, right love? Too-ta-loo, chin-chin, righty-oh up yer arseholes,” it said rather rudely.

He saw a tiny, milky-white, balding chap barking hideously mad insults as he broke from the main fracas and charged the outer wall where the well endowed Mexican army continued to advance.

“Cover me mates, I’m giving these dodgy wankers a real piece of cheese to snog on. No time for chinwagging, chums. Gotta knacker these jackals off. Talley-ho!” He hollered like a banshee as he charged the wall, head down without aiming his weapon. Suddenly a glowing streak of scarlet, then his body began to disintegrate.

“Blimey!” He managed to shriek as the wind carried the smoke and ashes with his final exclamation. 

“Damn fool,” yelled one colonist to another. “You killed Phil!”

Out of the church burst Davy Crockett, clad in spiked black skin tight leather, coon-skin capped, like royalty from beyond the stars. He was ten feet tall if he was an inch. He bellowed ferociously, “My name is David ‘Big D’ Crockett. I leap mountains. I skin bears with one mean look. I swallow rivers and puke out forest fires. I fuck fancy ladies bareback in a tornado. And I’m here to huff, and puff, and blow Santa Anna down, baby.” He let out a gasp of hot air that left barely a dent in the Mexican forces. 

“Well shit,” he muttered just as he was overwhelmed by the legitimate army using an intricate system of radioactive ropes and taken captive. 

Wild Buck Travis spun through the air, slicing several Mexican soldiers in half with his powerful katanas. Where the soldiers’ costumes failed as armor, they made up for with other strengths, as a single blow from the fist of a Mexican sent Travis’ head volleying through the air. It landed in front of Bennie, blinking.

The long barracks shook and smouldered, blasts and zaps and strobes like disco. There was hooting and hollering, but there was no Wolverine. Jim Bowie was nowhere to be found. He wondered why.

In an instant Bennie was jolted from his vision as the scene crumbled like a sheet of paper sucked through the hose of a high voltage vacuum. It was the piercing scream of a young girl that snapped him to the present. He felt a sick panic and a helplessness as his head swiveled. He keyed in on a child having a meltdown in front of Ripley’s Haunted Adventure across the street, at the exact place where Phil turned to dust. Her parents looked dazed and embarrassed, regretting even the thought of taking their small child to such a tasteless amusement. The Halloween-drobed actors tried to calm the child in character, but the sheer horror of the girl couldn’t be pacified. To Bennie, her demeanor was the only thing that didn’t seem grossly anachronistic in this place.

Relieved, he looked up at the American and Texas flags by the chapel and dreamily imagined someday fighting hordes of violent savages using some yet undiscovered mutant skill. He guiltily wished maybe ISIS would still be around when he grew up so he could have his turn.  

—

The globe spins backwards as a shocking burst of wind rips the flags off the pole and launches them skyward to be swallowed by the heavy gloom. A growling thunder rips across the sky and shatters the earth below. Icy bullets hail down, cracking the concrete and sending mud flying through the wet air. 

Travis stands at his lectern, blue cape over his Sergeant Pepper’s uniform studded with golden buttons flickering in the candlelight, breathing in a symphony of rain and soaking soil. With the flourish of his quill he pleads. 

“I am besieged, by a thousand or more Mexicans under Santa Anna – I have sustained a continual Bombardment & cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man – the enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken – I have answered the demand with a canon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls – I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch – The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor and that of his country – Victory or Death.” 

With that, George W. Bush closes his remarks to the 1999 U.S. Ryder Cup golf team, says “Godspeed,” and leaves. The team exchanges bewildered glances, then Tiger Woods yells “let’s rip the fucking bacon out of their necks,” and they go on to a surprising victory.

The storm pulverizes Alamo Plaza as the river rises and streams of mud pool into lakes of horse dung and debris, turning flower beds into floating gardens carrying the watery graves of dead chickens and stray dogs, as the banners of old glory sag and players in a brass band sink into the quicksand awaiting the arrival of President Benjamin Harrison. The U.S. Census Bureau declared the western frontier closed a year ago, meaning a sufficient number of indigenous people have been ethnically cleansed off their land to make the country safe for democracy. It is San Antonio’s proudest day.

“Hell, Vietnam is just like the Alamo,” Lyndon Baines Johnson belches at reporters gathered around the doorway of a White House bathroom. “Hell, it’s just like if you were down at the gate and you were surrounded and you damn well needed somebody…I thank the Lord I’ve got men who want to go for me, from McNamara right down to the littlest private with a gun.” He rises from his porcelain throne, and after wiping decides to show these Ivy Leaguers the distance between them and himself, and himself from the littlest private.

“You wanna know why Vietnam? This is why,” gesturing downward and toward the middle. “That’s off the record, boys.”

The land now fertilized with the blood of infidels, the spring of liberty is blooming on the world stage. 1898 brought the destruction of the Spanish empire at the hands of the United States, which now controlled Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii. Was the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine that sent the country to war a false-flag conspiracy? A court of inquiry called by President McKinley couldn’t come to a definitive conclusion, but the yellow-dog press whipped the isolationist population into a blood-lust that only an incalculable number of native and 15,000 Spanish corpses could satisfy.

Ten thousand flag-waving children sing America the Beautiful as the Conquistador in Chief swaggers up to the Alamo. The great empire that built this old mission is finally gutted like a fish, and the triumphant McKinley slices his hand through the air like a blade. Four months later, he’s gunned down by a so-called anarchist, really just a lone wolf tracing an identity through the spatter of blood.

Even as McKinley lay dying on his sick bed, his star had long been eclipsed by a strongly mustachioed New Yorker with the look of murder beaming through his monocle. In 1898 Theodore Roosevelt rode a pale horse into San Antonio to rile his Rough Riders into a killing frenzy that would be unleashed on Cuba, subjecting the island and its people to the same colonial exploitation it faced for the last 400 years under a different flag. Now in 1905 he sits regally atop a shitting steed facing the Alamo for a reunion with fifty of his lily-white compatriots.

The girl picks up the !Viva Kennedy! sign her mother dropped in the warm September breeze as her ears oscillate like saucers with the overstimulation of bilingual chanting and Frank Sinatra’s High Hopes pouring through the speakers. She is a shimmering bead of color and wind-swept black locks in a vast mosaic of heaving commotion. The sweet smell of roasted elote and late-season raspas swirl in her nostrils while through heavy mascara her mother blinks in approval of holding it up herself. Out of a tiny huipil her little arms rise over her head with the sign like an offering to Huitzilopochtli for better days ahead. 

Henry B. Gonzalez introduces Kennedy. The little girl thinks maybe he’s the governor, but he is a State Senator and former City Councilman. A mariachi band slams into the Star Spangled Banner. Kennedy matches the crowd’s energy as he struts up to the podium. 

The sound of the Senator from Massachusetts' voice is like Rock ‘n’ Roll, full of electricity and strange inflection, and with it he remembers the Alamo in a way this Latino audience has never heard from an Anglo. 

“If this place is dedicated to freedom–this day is also a landmark of liberty…for one-hundred and fifty years ago this Friday, Father Hidalgo made his famous plea for liberty when he asked his people ‘will you have freedom’ and they responded by beginning Mexico’s war for independence.”

Never has this crowd heard a gringo, much less one running for president, assert that freedom and democracy was something indigenous to the Mexican people. It was always something their unruly spirits had to be subdued into accepting, a gift of defeat by their benevolent conquerors. They are encouraged by this recognition of their own agency, and remember well that before his kind was invited, this land that was Mexico had a stronger claim to the word “democracy” than their neighbors to the North. They had abolished slavery and elected as their leader a descendant of Africans, a feat unimaginable in the US of 1960. 

They have no way of knowing that the presidential hopeful is already getting briefings from the CIA outlining a secret plan to train Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and seize it for American business interests, or that the closer ties to Latin America he’s championing involve the violent overturn of free elections to install puppet dictators. It is the same colonialism that dispossessed their ancestors and subjected them to pogroms and exploitation, under a bright, telegenic, liberal sheen.

The other side of the imperial coin surfaces a few weeks later, flashing a shit-eating grin through a veil of sweat. Richard Milhous Nixon awkwardly tries to distance himself from the appearance of being anti-Catholic. Kennedy had recently silenced the prejudiced attacks on his faith with the concise “there were no religious tests at the Alamo.”   

Now Nixon speaks through perpetually clenched teeth wearing a jolly grimace in front of the old Catholic church. “Well, ah, if Senator Kennedy were to be elected, ah, it’s not the Pope he’ll be getting his marching orders from. No! It’ll be the president of the United Auto Workers,” he declares to cheers from an audience decidedly more financially secure and in need of sunscreen than the previous crowd.

Across town the moon falls east and the sun rises west as William Howard Taft dedicates a new chapel at Fort Sam Houston. Technically peace-time, the state is roiling with racialized warfare, with ritualistic Negro lynchings and genocidal actions taken by the Texas Rangers against Mexicans. Earlier in the year Crazy Snake raised a rebellion in Oklahoma for land and against Jim Crow. After bowing his head in prayer at the chapel, President Taft calls for an expansion of the military.

After another ship dubiously sinks to the ocean floor, that military is sent to the killing fields of Europe. Twenty million dead, new heroes and villains. Smedley Butler emerges as a rare general who both recognizes that war is a racket and tells the public so. He leads a march on Washington of sick and wounded veterans in 1932 to demand their bonuses to lift them out of poverty and destitution. They're called the Bonus Army and their Alamo is the steps of the U.S. Capitol building. Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur lead an attack on the veterans with mounted calvary, tear gas, machine guns, and tanks. 

The elite interests that called for the attack on the Bonus Army are especially threatened by FDR. They think he’s a communist, and no matter how maverick General Butler might be, at least he was no damn commie. They ask if he’d like to be installed as President, after they have Roosevelt assassinated. Not only does he say no, he blows the whistle. Few are listening.

Clara O’Driscoll is no commie, but she is delighted at the president’s arrival. Her family’s wealth can be traced back to cotton plantations in Mississippi. Her grandfather was in the Battle of San Jacinto. After staging a coup of her own against Adina de Zavala and her obsession with historical accuracy, she is the president of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, to which the Alamo is entrusted. Now she can sanctify her make-believe Alamo story with a Presidential blessing. After only touring the church where no one was killed, President Roosevelt gives a speech honoring the sacrifice.      

Harry Truman echoes these remarks almost exactly a year after establishing the Central Intelligence Agency. We’ll defend all the little Alamos around the world against Crazy Joe Stalin’s evil empire. Where there is no Alamo, we’ll make one up.

Saddam Hussein makes a good stand-in for Santa Anna as President Bill Clinton visits the Alamo ahead of the 1996 election. He just received a report he'd rather not get out that US sanctions have starved around half a million Iraqi children to death.

The radio host wheezes through his only working lung, jowls cradling his Presidential Medal of Freedom to the rise and fall of his boozy breath. His body ravaged by cigar smoke and opioids, he built a career on defending tobacco corporations and training his audience to see the poor as lazy drug users and drug users as a problem solved by iron cages and gas chambers. His twitching eyes stare lustily at a President shaped from his own clay. The stars and stripes frame the Chief Executive’s yellow poof as behind him sit two dead-eyed avatars of balanced government. 

President Trump lauds the success of his cabinet of billionaires making bank off tax-cuts, the soaring profits of insurance companies built on the corpses of the poor, the illegal assassination of a general in a country we’re not at war with, and law enforcement for preparing to do battle on the Southern border against unarmed refugees. Now he turns his attention to an Army-wife in the audience.

“For the past seven months, she has done it all while her husband, Sergeant First-Class Townsend, is in Afghanistan on his fourth deployment of the Middle-East…Thank you, Amy,” he crooned through loose dentures.

Members of Congress and their guests erupt with whoops of “USA! USA! USA!”

“As the world bears witness tonight, America is a land of heroes,” Trump continues. “This is the place where the pilgrims landed at Plymouth and where Texas patriots made their last stand at the Alamo – the beautiful, beautiful Alamo. As we look ahead into America’s golden future, we will take Greenland, one way or another, and we will plant an American flag in Martian soil. God bless America.” 

The chamber explodes in an orgasmic crescendo as Trump steps off the podium and glad-hands his way to the exit as the PA system blares The Village People’s 1979 smash hit, Y.M.C.A. 

Rush tries to gesticulate his arms with the music, but becomes winded and crumbles into his chair.

—

A faint clicking and hum as the sable leaps onto the ledge of the eighty-third story window. Its lenses scan the neon circus of Red River street below, a nocturnal glowing cornucopia of color and synthetic movement. The transistors in its skull are incapable of processing the input, the equations are too vast for its limited programming, so it opens its mouth to tap teeth against the glass. Diving off, it scurries under the ficus. 

Shadows of many trees, vines, and bushes are cast against the wall by a flickering blue light in bent shapes like warped television test patterns. A large tank bubbles with a solitary fish swimming low over turquoise pebbles. Big lipped and pot-bellied, its grey head contrasts with a bright purple body and sharp green spines in its dorsal fin. The upper and lower caudal fins resemble that of an angel fish and are yellow, along with the anal, pelvic, and pectoral fins. Glass tables line the room displaying little orbs containing the preserved bodies of recently extinct animals. Nearly 95% of all insects and animals weighing under a kilogram have vanished in the last fifty years. The rats and roaches remain. 

A scarred, meaty hand reaches into the tank to serve the fish a leech for dinner. He shakes his hand dry, grabs his vape, and raises it to his thin red lips. The sable dashes from the top of a bookshelf and pauses atop a secure metal cabinet to watch a great cloud swallow its master’s massive smooth head. The back of his neck looks like a pack of hotdogs. It darts off again.

Franky Carbuncle reclines in his seat and attaches the headset that gives him command of the four screens mounted in front of him. Now activated the screens stretch toward him phototropismatically and scan through hundreds of news reports. 

Corporations fully recuperated any accessible independent media long ago. On one feed, straight-laced reporters in pressed suits radiate legitimacy. Another feed shows women discussing water rations while snorting ketamine through cybernetic noses. Yet another feed has amphetamine fueled men wearing grills and facially reconstructed to resemble Elvis debating whether dolphins can consent. All cover the same stories for the same companies. While a boom in religious fundamentalism has kept more vanilla media-types in demand, the pornification of political entertainment has become dominant, germinating early in the century with figures like Sarah Palin during her 2008 Vice Presidential run and escalating dramatically in the 2020s with deep-fake AI images produced of members of Congress. The most popular platform is “Jackin’ Off with Jack and Jackie” from Viacom, owned by Disney, where the hosts report on D.C. politics while using remote control adult novelty products to catch their guests off-guard. There are multiple climaxes in a typical episode. 

New settlements are popping up in Los Angeles using technology developed on Mars to terraform the scorched earth of the once great city. The last of the koalas has perished. The massive Atlantic fat-berg sunk a cruise-ship off the coast of Belize. China formally offers to help the US restore electricity to Kansas for the third time in two years. Europe will vote Monday on whether to divide into separate countries yet again. Russia threatens retaliation if nuclear testing in Greenland continues. Tulsa becomes the 12th US city to declare its independence and join the Confederacy of Free Workers. Brazil is the latest Latin American country to expel their US embassy. The Democratic Republic of the Congo nationalizes all mining operations in the country. Eighteen protestors anticipating a nasty response are shot dead by an AI drone in Langley, VA. It rained in the Amazon today. Cryptocurrency mining now consumes more electricity than the continents of Asia and Europe combined. President Hank J. Bulldick says he’s considering reducing the Supreme Court back to nine seats and ending term limits. Palestine sends a probe to conduct research on Saturn’s ice moon, Enceladus. Discovery announces shark week is canceled due to lack of sharks. The Attorney General is investigating the Defense Intelligence Agency for investigating the Central Intelligence Agency for investigating the Federal Bureau of Investigations.   

Carbuncle smiles at such a sally. He leans forward as a report comes across the feed about dozens of convicted felons set to be released from a maximum security prison in El Salvador back to the United States. The four screens now project a single image, a gaunt weathered face framed by grey sideburns and a black pompadour. His eyes stare into Carbuncle's with the intensity of blood shed by every poor working person in every war, every massacre, every deadly factory and warehouse. His nipples shake with grim laughter. Here is his escape plan from deployment to the Congo. Here is his ticket to Mars.

The sable jumps onto his lap and he grabs it by the neck and drops it back on the cold tile. It scrambles and crawls up an open sarcophagus from Egypt.